The worst aspect of modern college football that gets the least attention

Gigantic oversized conferences produce extremely lopsided schedule disparities.

Saw a long Twitter thread from the College Football Nerds talking about this issue.

https://x.com/i/status/2083563892811116823

It's always been difficult to compare teams across conferences, but now you can't even reliably compare two teams within the "same" conference.

They provided a few ridiculous examples.

FSU and Clemson are both in the ACC yet they share ONE common opponent. Ordering them in conference standings is a complete farce.

SMU plays 1 game against the top 7 finishers of the ACC. Their schedule is literally the entire bottom half of the conference.

They used A&M last year as an example from the SEC, who through no fault of their own also had a conference schedule that was almost exclusively the entire bottom half of the conference.

With 8-10 you can do full round robin, with 12 you could do reasonable divisions, there a reason conferences naturally stopped there for all of history until everything went insane a few years ago.

A conference of 16, 18, 20 teams isn't really even a conference anymore. The teams at the top of the standings will be as much a function of favorable schedule as quality of team.