[JohnR34231]

A reminder that when we scheduled them, UCF was the body bag game.  They were 0-12 the year we first played them.

BC

This. Schedules are made 6-10 years in advance. It's a crap shoot to figure out who's gonna be good or not good that far out unless you are scheduling Ohio State or Alabama. UCF was a nobody before Scott Frost got there. I'm sure Stanford was thinking that Northwestern is a Power 5 that, on average, isn't in the AP top 25, and is a top academic school that we can get warm fuzzies playing.

it seems like our strategy has been for some time to schedule a team we feel we can almost always beat, a good academic school that we can usually beat, and ND. Unfortunately the first two didn't work out so well this year,

[JohnR34231]

A reminder that when we scheduled them, UCF was the body bag game.  They were 0-12 the year we first played them.

BC

This. Schedules are made 6-10 years in advance. It's a crap shoot to figure out who's gonna be good or not good that far out unless you are scheduling Ohio State or Alabama. UCF was a nobody before Scott Frost got there. I'm sure Stanford was thinking that Northwestern is a Power 5 that, on average, isn't in the AP top 25, and is a top academic school that we can get warm fuzzies playing.

it seems like our strategy has been for some time to schedule a team we feel we can almost always beat, a good academic school that we can usually beat, and ND. Unfortunately the first two didn't work out so well this year,