One of the biggest question marks surrounding the College Football Playoff rankings is how little the committee seems to care about strength of schedule. The six SEC schools in contention to make the CFP have the toughest schedules compared to every other program fighting for a CFP spot. But the committee somehow only has one SEC team inside their top five.
This is sending a very clear message that the only thing that matters is how many wins a team has, not who they beat along the way.
This has created a new debate in the college football world about non-conference schedules. Programs aren't able to control who they play during conference play, but they do have the ability to schedule whoever they want in the non-conference portion of their season. So the argument now is that teams should stop scheduling difficult non-conference games and load them up with easy wins.
Kirby Smart was asked about this discussion, and it sounds like he still wants to keep scheduling tough opponents for Georgia football.
"The happiness of our fans. That’s the incentive, right? Because fans want you to be in the playoffs, but they sure don’t want you to play cupcakes,” Smart said via dawgnation.com. “They want you to go play quality opponents. I like the whole – I mean, going to schedule a great team and going to play somebody in a neutral site game, a kickoff classic. I love all that stuff. So I want to do as much of that as I can. But I don’t know. We’ll see where all this stuff goes.”
Kirby Smart wants to continue scheduling tough games
Smart pretty clearly states that he wants to continue having big games to start their season, similarly to this year when Georgia opened their season against Clemson. The main reason he mentioned was for the fanbase, who obviously would much rather play a team like Clemson instead of a no name school nobody's heard of.
But there are other benefits to this as well. Georgia will be much better prepared for the season ahead if they play good teams early in their season. This wil help them learn very early about what things they need to improve on, which is harder to discover against bad opponents.
Also, having one of the more difficult schedules could matter in the future. It's clear it doesn't matter to the CFP committee this season, but the memebers of the committee change so maybe the next group will care about this metric.
But for now, Georgia fans don't have to worry about UGA's schedule getting boring. And that is good news because Georgia has games against Ohio State, Florida State, Clemson and a few other power four schools already on future schedules. So Georgia will continue having these marquee games, which is exciting for everyone involved.