Something of a brouhaha was made in the offseason about the proclivity of Alabama's opponents to schedule an off-week before playing the Crimson Tide. In 2010 the last six of Alabama's eight conference opponents have two weeks to prepare. In addition, Alabama's toughest non-conference opponent hosts an FCS team the week before traveling to Tuscaloosa (Youngstown State vs Penn State is nearly an off-week.)
I've enhanced the Season by Week report so that the team name links to a page that shows the schedule by week for the selected team and all of its opponents to make such things easier to see. See Alabama's page for an example.
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That same sample, though, shows that Alabama's extreme is not exactly unique: When you count games vs FCS opponents one of Alabama's chief rivals has nearly as many "disadvantaged" games. It is worth noting that Alabama places its Bye week before its game against LSU, and before another one of its main rivals plays Georgia State, who is at least a year away from being even an FCS team.
There's nothing new about the practice of scheduling off-weeks before rivalry games. I can remember when "Iron Bowl Week" was actually two weeks because neither Alabama nor Auburn played the week before it. (As a child growing up in Alabama I hated that off-week: it was as if no college football were being played anywhere.) Of course, Tennessee was as big or bigger a rival from Alabama's viewpoint, and Georgia from Auburn's, but I'm not going back through the schedules to check bye/FCS dates from the 60s and 70s.
What is different is that more teams than Tennessee and Auburn consider Alabama a "rival" whether the Tide fans
do or not. LSU in particular has displaced Ole Miss as a main rival in the SEC West but Ole Miss hasn't dropped the "rivalry"
monicker from Alabama regardless of how one-sided that series has become. (Alabama's 33-32 win in 1969 remains one of the most
entertaining games I've ever seen on TV.)
It's only fair to point out that Alabama has "off-weeks" too, so even though LSU has an off-week before the Alabama game, there's no "unfair advantage" since Alabama scheduled their BYE the week before the LSU game. Likewise even though Auburn has an open date the week before the Iron Bowl, Alabama plays unclassified first-year-team Georgia State that week.
If we don't count opponents' "easy" weeks prior to a team's games, there are two more teams with as many "challenges" as Auburn. It's not obvious that their opponents intentionally scheduled them based upon the upcoming opponent - we're talking about Iowa State and Western Kentucky. Still, it's a fair bet that's the case for the defending BCS champions. Here are the values for all FBS teams.