I regret having failed to make the connection with Bring On The Cats. My bad.

Fresno State is a special case, as Pat Hill’s squad has always adopted the “anybody, anytime, anywhere” mentality that causes the Bulldogs to play their best against B.C.S. conference opponents, leaving less in the tank for conference play. (Consider F.S.U.’s plummet after leaving it all on the field against U.S.C. in 2005.) Such a style of play, incidentally, has gotten Fresno State recent bowl wins over Georgia Tech (twice), U.C.L.A., and Virginia.

I believe there are as many examples on the other side of the argument which support the need for a strong non-conference schedule; e.g., Texas-Ohio State in 2005, Louisiana State-Virginia Tech in 2007 (which, as Sunday Morning Quarterback notes, remains the most impressive regular-season non-conference result of last autumn, which undoubtedly helped L.S.U. to get into the title game), and, very likely, Ohio State-Southern California and Georgia-Arizona State in 2008.

My broader point was that I believe Texas Tech’s rise to prominence (like Kansas State’s under Bill Snyder) is in some (though not all) ways a chimera, based on won-lost records inflated by blowout wins over weak teams. I quite agree that the system does not punish, and may even reward, such weak scheduling; where we disagree, apparently, is whether the system should encourage tougher scheduling. Poll voting, at least at the highest level, does appear to take strength of schedule into account, as it should, and, for my part, I will continue to sound the call for tougher slates among all serious college football programs.

Finally, I recognize that the N.C.A.A. changed it to “F.C.S.” and “F.B.S.” I also recognize that Prince changed his name to a symbol that cannot be pronounced. In both instances, I just rolled my eyes and kept calling them what they are. Like Phil Steele, I continue to have “Division I-A” and “Division I-AA” wired into my brain, and I’m not going to change.

I wasn’t aware of that, and I appreciate the clarification.

Six Division I-AA opponents in a four-year period still is quite a lot, but I’m glad to know that (except for 2005) the Red Raiders are only trying to schedule one a year, as many Division I-A teams (regrettably) do.

I see you didn’t include Eastern Washington in the four D I-AA teams Tech has played in the past three years. That said, I don’t see that as substantively different (given the sample size) of Georgia, who has played three in the past four years. Texas Tech, stated differently, has played four D I-AA opponents in the past four years.

. . . this discussion started with my posting about four teams that I thought were being ranked higher by the preseason polls and the preview magazines than I believed was justified. Obviously, no one yet knows whether I am right or, for instance, Phil Steele is right when it comes to Clemson, Kansas, Pittsburgh, or Texas Tech. I was just offering my opinion and we will learn in the fall who was correct.

(As an aside, I would offer two points in my defense. First of all, my weekly predictions during the season are made under the heading “Don’t Bet On It!” I freely admit that my prognosticating skills are average, at best, so I make no claim to being an expert. Secondly, each January, after the season is done, I go back and revisit my preseason predictions to evaluate where I was right and where I was wrong.)

My initial posting received several responses, most of which I found reasonable despite my disagreement with many of their conclusions. However, TB trotted out the claim that S.E.C. teams don’t travel, which is, at best, an outdated notion. The above posting was an effort to rebut that tired canard, which needs to be consigned to the scrap heap of false cliches, alongside “S.E.C. speed!” and the usual carping about Pac-10 defenses and Big Ten offenses. I pledged last summer to fight the conference wars no longer, so I do what I can to address the silly and petty bigotries many fans still hold against other leagues and regions. (This is a two-way street, by the way, as I not only defend the S.E.C. against unfounded criticisms, but I also have criticized Phillip Fulmer, Urban Meyer, Les Miles, and Nick Saban for ill-considered comments about other leagues. I’m taking a late lunch right now, but I’ll post the links later if you’d like.)

I erred (and owned up to my error) by failing to note that TB is a Kansas State fan. Because his comment was offered at a Texas Tech weblog, I mistakenly presumed he was a Red Raider fan. I was wrong, and I expressed my regret at having made that error.

So, to reiterate, the course of events was this: I listed Texas Tech as one of the teams I thought was overrated by the preseason magazines, in part because the Red Raiders’ won-lost records have been bolstered by soft non-conference slates; various responses were offered, including TB’s comment singling out the S.E.C. as a whole; I authored the above posting rebutting TB’s argument; and this comment thread ensued.

I regret that Texas Tech (a team Georgia played twice during the regular season in the 1990s, by the way) got dragged into the middle of this, which was my mistake, although (a) nothing I have noted about the Red Raiders is inaccurate (even if, as with the Tulsa example, it was incomplete, and I am grateful for the clarification) and (b) I trust a similar comparison of Georgia’s out-of-conference scheduling since the start of the Bill Snyder era would reveal a similar superiority to the scheduling practices of TB’s Wildcats. At a minimum, though, I believe my point--that singling out the S.E.C. for special criticism regarding out-of-conference scheduling is unwarranted and unjustified—has been proven, even if extenuating circumstances explain Texas Tech’s non-league slates.

I don’t even think we have to agree to disagree, because we may have arrived at a point at which we are carrying on two different, parallel conversations. In any case, though, I thank you for taking the time to comment and I hope that explains how we got from there to here.

I don’t believe this is the correct thread to defend KU and TTU’s potential overrating. That said, I do believe you speak the truth, though it comes out kinda homerized. I don’t believe that the “afraid to play us” statement will last much longer, provided we truly aren’t overrated this season.

. . . that shows Georgia is the eighth-most underrated team in the country (and the most underrated in the S.E.C.), there are two problems with that table.

First of all, it merely measures preseason and postseason rankings. By definition, any “surprise” team (for instance, Washington State, the team at the top of the table and a squad that always seemed to go from 5-6 to 10-2 without warning) would be “underrated” (more likely, not initially ranked) using that metric.

Poll rankings, however, are not invariably synonymous with quality, either in the preseason (which is largely guesswork) or in the postseason (when pretty records often receive rankings that were not earned based upon the quality of the competition). I would be more impressed with those numbers if they reflected resume rankers’ estimations rather than power pollsters’ evaluations.

Secondly, what does history have to do with it? I think the pollsters and previewers are overrating Kansas and Texas Tech this year because they are being ranked highly. Unlike in previous years, they have nowhere to go but down, relatively speaking. Whether the Jayhawks were given their due in the astonishingly small sample size of the three seasons since 1989 in which they ended up ranked is absolutely irrelevant to whether their 2008 preseason ranking holds a thimbleful of water.