About a month ago, I posted an article critiquing Rivals.com strength of schedule rankings. The main thrust of my argument was that their standards appeared to be applied haphazardly given how similar Florida's and Alabama's schedules are this season. Florida's schedule is ranked 7th nationally and Alabama's is unranked.
Paul Westerdawg of the Georgia Sports Blog linked to my post about this in a post discussing AJC's Tony Barnhart's ranking of the five best out of conference games involving SEC teams. I'm glad Paul linked to it because it prompted a reader of that site, DW, to send us an email with a fact that I was unaware of:
weeks. Bama is playing 5 teams that will be coming off of bye weeks this year (Arkansas, FSU, LSU, MSU, Auburn). No other SEC team is playing more than 1 team off of a bye except LSU which will play 2 such teams.
We have a bye week the same as LSU, so we will come into that one on equal footing, but it is interesting that nearly half of the teams we face will play us with two weeks' worth of preparation, which could be significant.