re: Who's brilliant idea was it to play Duke as our marquee...

Honestly I don’t think it would have mattered who we played. Everyone else but us gets a SOS boost as long as the team they played was ranked high when they played them, but Bama has to hope that they stay good. Case in point was FSU in 2017. That game was talked about all offseason as literally “the biggest CFB opener of all time.” We dominate, but FSU goes on to have a terrible season, and by the end of the year everyone was talking about how bad our schedule was to try to keep us from getting into the top 4.

This year, Georgia gets a boost for wins over ND and Florida just because of where they were ranked at the time. I mean does anybody really consider Florida a top-10 quality win?