A First Look at the 2008 Schedule

© Copyright 2008, Paul Kislanko

They really need to go back to only counting wins over FCS teams once every four years for bowl-eligibility purposes, or at least only twice in any four-year span. 12 games would be enough to connect the football field at least to the degree that basketball and baseball are connected, considering the number of teams in the Bowl Championship Subdivision compared to the number of teams in the other D-1 sports.

You can peruse the connectivity for all teams, but it's not that much better than last year.

Season APL CI Team #O #OO N3 N4
2006 2.49   Total Pairs 677 2570 3461 313
    46.20 Percent 9.60 36.60 49.30 4.50
             
2007 2.48   Total Pairs 675 2548 3532 266
    45.90 Percent 9.60 36.30 50.30 3.80
             
2008 2.46   Total Pairs 678 2686 3562 214
    47.11 Percent 9.50 37.62 49.89 3.00

The "hall of shame" for 2008 includes five teams who have two FCS opponents:
Conn% APL Team NT1 NT2 NT3 NT4
52.1 2.49 Western Kentucky 10 52 46 11
42.86 2.55 Texas Tech 10 41 61 7
37.82 2.57 Florida St 10 35 70 4
34.45 2.69 Clemson 10 31 64 14
33.61 2.62 Georgia Tech 10 30 74 5
    D1 Average 11.3 44.8 59.4 4.4

Now, we can cut Western Kentucky some slack, since it wasn't that long ago they were an FCS team themselves. But Texas Tech shows up on this list way too often and there's almost no excuse for three ACC teams to be on it.

Inter-conference matchups

Now, this table does look a lot better than last years. Instead of the most non-conference games being against the Sun Belt (and no slight to them) SEC teams have the most games against ACC teams. Alas, the ACC is up to 14 games against FCS teams.
ACC BigE B10 B12 ND P10 SEC CUSA Ind MAC MW SBC WAC FCS
ACC ∗ 4 1 4 2 2 10 5 3 2 0 1 0 14
BigE 4 ∗ 3 5 2 0 2 5 3 6 0 2 2 7
B10 1 3 ∗ 2 3 4 0 1 1 13 1 5 1 9
B12 4 5 2 ∗ 0 3 1 4 1 3 4 6 5 10
ND 2 2 3 0 ∗ 3 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0
P10 2 0 4 3 3 ∗ 2 0 0 1 7 0 7 2
SEC 10 2 0 1 0 2 ∗ 8 2 3 1 8 2 9
CUSA 5 5 1 4 0 0 8 ∗ 3 1 4 8 2 7
Ind 3 3 1 1 1 0 2 3 ∗ 8 2 5 1 4
MAC 2 6 13 3 0 1 3 1 8 ∗ 2 2 3 8
MW 0 0 1 4 1 7 1 4 2 2 ∗ 0 7 7
SBC 1 2 5 6 0 0 8 8 5 2 0 ∗ 0 3
WAC 0 2 1 5 0 7 2 2 1 3 7 0 ∗ 7
FCS 14 7 9 10 0 2 9 7 4 8 7 3 7

And it's nice to see that the Big TEleveN "only" plays 13 games against the MAC.