Understand and agree…end of year rankings > pre-season rankings. But we’re discussing this in the pre-season, so we don’t have that information yet. So I’ll still say that I’ll bet no other team in history has had a schedule that included 6 of the top 13 (preseason) teams in the country.
Second thing - with this particular schedule, it’s VERY unlikely the EOY ranking will vary too much. One reason is the “incestuous” nature of the SEC and who is clustered at the top of the FPI SOS rankings. With SEC teams ONLY playing within themselves, it is guaranteed that they will all say ranked very high (in SOS). No teams outside of the SEC play any SEC teams, so cannot “gain” on the SEC teams, who will only bolster their own SOS rankings playing each other.
Yet another reason why this season is unusual. By my count…about reason # 2,438…with more to come.
Also, Clay, I’m sure you’re right that they can’t go back 150 years with the FPI…but I’ll bet they could the last 50 years or so…probably longer than that. The records exist to calculate FPI for that block of time. And even though FPI may not be something that can be estimated for all seasons, there are other metrics used for SOS…some better than others…like W/L record of opponents, that could be used.
As I’ve said here many times, I always assume Arkansas has “the hardest” (or, close enough to it that the difference doesn’t really matter) schedule in the country. I’ve used the analogy of a golf tournament before. The winner doesn’t have to shoot the best (lowest) round in any of the 4 days to win the tournament; he just needs to have the best aggregate. He might shoot a 69 on day 1 while someone else shoots 66. But if the winner shoots a 68 on Day 2 (still not low round of the day) while the other guy (from day 1) balloons to a 77 on day 2, he’s ahead of that first day leader.
In similar fashion, Arkansas need never have to have THE hardest schedule in a given year (though, we have) to have had the hardest schedule over any 5 or 10 year “rolling” period of time. That’s what I figured out somewhere around Y2K. It used to really gall me when these know-nothing national “journalists” would ridicule our non-conference schedule in a given year, TOTALLY ignoring the fact that overall, our SOS was - say - #7 in the country. So I did some research and figured out that, year in and year out (since we joined the SEC), our schedule is THE most difficult of any team in the nation.
A few years later, this article came out (scroll down to the third table) and confirmed it with hard research. Our schedule hasn’t gotten any easier since then.