It’s pretty much every year around this time when folks began to complain about top football programs having a pretty soft schedule that gets them where they want to at the end of the season. The #1 culprit for people seems to be the Alabama Crimson Tide.
The Crimson Tide play a tough SEC schedule, but their non-conference schedule is among the country’s easiest. Bama will be playing the Duke Blue Devils in a neutral-site game to open the season as well as New Mexico State, Southern Miss and Western Carolina at home.
Saban appeared on ESPN earlier this week and fired back at his critics about the 2019 scehdule for his program.
“I think the culture of college football would benefit if we said Power 5 teams have to play all Power 5 teams. I’ve been an advocate of this for several years,” Saban said on ESPN’s Golic and Wingo show, per 247Sports. “I’ve been an advocate of playing more SEC games. Well, I think you should do it like basketball, they have RPI, or whatever it’s called. And basketball says these are the teams that played the best schedule and won the biggest games. So that’s how you qualify for a bowl game, not how many games you win. So that it would be better for fans, it would be better for fan interest.
“So we’ve tried to schedule two opponents — Power Five opponents — every year. We have one time in the next 10 years, we’ve succeeded at doing that. So unless we change the culture of how we all agree to schedule, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
This will forever be an issue with Alabama, but there aren’t a lot of teams out there who can say they would have a chance in defeating them no matter where the game is. I mean, aside from the Clemson Tigers.
