[Goose]

I’m not talking about playing USC instead of So. Utah.  Stanford already has Davis on the schedule and you can only schedule one FCS school per year.  I’m talking about when you play a particular opponent not who you play.

OK, fair enough. However, as has been discussed at length, if both Stanford and USC insist on playing ND, it creates "fixed points" in the time schedule, because ND wants to play late in the year on the west coast. That basically precludes "spacing" the games for the contending teams arbitrarily. It is certainly true that two years ago there were some really bad short week teams against teams coming off a bye. That kind of thing can be mitigated, and basically has been.
      As I see it, the problem isn't the "when" of the schedule. That is a second-order problem. The first problem is that the PAC12 plays one more conference game, which makes a real difference in both the probability of getting beat by a "lesser" team and in the ability to "spread out" the clearly competitive games. The second problem is that some schools, particularly USC and Stanford, have other schedule constrains/desires that limits scheduling options. Given that we probably don't want to change those things, it is not probable a "better" schedule can be reliably created.

[Goose]

I’m not talking about playing USC instead of So. Utah.  Stanford already has Davis on the schedule and you can only schedule one FCS school per year.  I’m talking about when you play a particular opponent not who you play.

OK, fair enough. However, as has been discussed at length, if both Stanford and USC insist on playing ND, it creates "fixed points" in the time schedule, because ND wants to play late in the year on the west coast. That basically precludes "spacing" the games for the contending teams arbitrarily. It is certainly true that two years ago there were some really bad short week teams against teams coming off a bye. That kind of thing can be mitigated, and basically has been.
      As I see it, the problem isn't the "when" of the schedule. That is a second-order problem. The first problem is that the PAC12 plays one more conference game, which makes a real difference in both the probability of getting beat by a "lesser" team and in the ability to "spread out" the clearly competitive games. The second problem is that some schools, particularly USC and Stanford, have other schedule constrains/desires that limits scheduling options. Given that we probably don't want to change those things, it is not probable a "better" schedule can be reliably created.