Rigby.
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I think one good step is the death of divisions. It ain't even a pup or michigan thing - some program always eats in a divisional format. It's rare where you have two good divisions worth of teams to compete against an elite squad. There was a good while where we were saying the same thing about Alabama and the SECW (even though the East was usually worse, it was at least semi-competitive in the same stretch where the West was meh)
but yeah in the era of super conferences and 9 conf game schedules, you really ain't gonna be able to afford to schedule hard OOCs. If you got a real chance of losing in the first two weeks and THEN gotta play say, Oklahoma, Texas, Auburn, Alabama and Florida...I mean c'mon lol.