Here is an analysis of the non con schedule...

Posted on: January 20, 2022 at 08:31:38 CT

That I did about 2 months ago. The changes since I posted this are we replaced E. Kentucky with Penn St, and instead of playing Ball St 3 times and Stanford and NW once each, we play all 3 teams twice here in Columbia. So that improves the SOS somewhat, giving us 5 games against last years 26-50 RPI instead of 3, to go along with the 5 against last years top 1-25. Both those numbers are solid, comparable to many other top 25 teams schedules (not all). My complaint is still we need more games against top 50-100 and fewer against 100+. Of course, this is using last years final RPI, teams will be better or worse than that, but I think NW and Stanford are likely to be higher, they are solid teams. Here is my late November post:

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Now that the schedule is complete, here is how it looks using last years RPI, with a few adjustments. As I understand it now, D3 St. Thomas is jumping to D1 starting this year (kind of strange), so I’m going to list them as 200+. And Bethune Cookman cancelled softball in 2021; they had a 200 RPI in 2019, then went 5-28 in 2020 (can’t find that years final RPI for the shortened season, so listing them as 200+ too):

3 UCLA
15 Oregon
16 Virginia Tech
18 Washington
19 Liberty
35 Stanford
39 S. Alabama
50 Northwestern
60 Kansas
64 E. Kentucky
81 Texas Tech
84 Ball St
84 Ball St
84 Ball St
87 San Diego St
94 FGCU
105 Illinois
113 UConn
124 North Carolina
128 UMKC
157 Bradley
157 Bradley
158 Wisconsin
165 Maryland
166 SLU
169 Florida Atlantic
200+ Bethune Cookman
209+ St Thomas
200+ St Thomas
200+ St Thomas
227 Western Illinois

5 games against top 25 teams (decent)
3 against top 26-50 (need more of these)
2 against 61-75 (need more of these)
6 against 76-100
15/31 games against 100+ teams, 11 of those 15 against 150+ teams

We could easily end up playing 21/31 games against teams with RPIs in the 100+ range.