2010 a Record Year for AQ Schools OOC Scheduling

2010 was a record setting year for college football. And I’m not just talking about the legal gymnastics the NCAA exhibited to clear several high profile players.

To follow up on my earlier study, where I examined out of conference (OOC) scheduling for the 6 Automatic Qualifying (AQ) conferences since the creation of the BCS, I looked at the 2010 regular season to see if the disturbing trend toward scheduling cupcakes for OOC games continued. Did it?? Of course it did!

*All conferences except the Big 12 and the SEC decreased the % of OOC games played against fellow AQ schools in 20101

*Every conference except the Big 12 played nearly 1 in 4 of its OOC games against an FCS school

*Three conferences (Big 10, Pac-10, SEC) played the highest % of OOC games against FCS schools ever

*The Big 10 became only the 2nd conference ever (Big 12 – 2005) to play more games against FCS schools (10) than against fellow AQ conference schools (9)2

*The Big 10 and Pac-10 each played more than 20% of their OOC games against FCS opponents for the first time ever

*Among all 6 conferences, 22.4% (58 of 259) of all OOC games were played against FCS schools, which marked the third consecutive year a record was set in this category

Percentage of OOC Games versus AQ, FBS Non-AQ, and FCS teams in 2010

2010	AQ	FBS NON-AQ	FCS
ACC	40	33	27
BIG EAST	38	40	23
BIG 10	27	50	23
BIG 12	25	58	17
PAC 10	48	29	23
SEC	33	44	23

Footnotes:
1 – Similar to the earlier study, games against Notre Dame were included in the AQ category for % calculation purposes

2 – Notre Dame was excluded from this calculation and only schools in the 6 AQ conferences were used