Brief discussion on college football

Maybe it's just me, but I'm really not all that impressed with most of the "elite" teams in college football this year. We hear a lot about high-flying offenses like those of Missouri and Oklahoma, and tend to accept them as being solid teams without really questioning them. But is it really that impressive if you're pounding on #221 Alcorn State? Let's examine the highest scoring offenses so far this year, limiting ourselves to the teams with an average scoring differential over 30 points:

1. (#24) Florida State, 54
2. (#2) Oklahoma, 40.7
3. Troy, 39.5
4. (#1) USC, 38.5
5. (#5) Missouri, 37
6. (#7) Texas, 35.5
7. (#4) Florida, 34.5
8. TCU, 33.3
9. (#6) LSU, 33
10. Iowa, 31
11. Indiana, 30

With the exception of a few surprises, that's pretty much the AP top ten list. But what happens if you calculate each team's strength of schedule? Just for laughs, I calculated each of these 11 teams' opponents' average RPI ranking (essentially a composite ranking of every NCAA team, taken from realtimerpi.com) and came up with the following:

1. USC, 39.5
2. Florida, 81
3. Oklahoma, 109.3
4. Missouri, 111.3
5. Iowa, 113.7
6. Texas, 116.5
7. LSU, 121.5
8. TCU, 123
9. Troy, 142
10. Indiana, 148.5
11. Florida State, 187

Through two or three games for ten of these teams, they haven't even been remotely tested. It's really easy to put up gaudy numbers against teams rated below #100. Florida State's case is particularly reprehensible, feasting on #192 Western Carolina and #182 Chattanooga. Not too hard to average wins by 54 points against competition like that. Now that conference play is starting, and these teams will be required to play against their peers, I predict some of those ridiculous scoring margins will decrease, and we'll see a different lineup of scoring leaders in a few weeks.