I continue to wonder why anyone schedules against SIMs in BCS confs

Those teams tend to win very few games. In conference, they tend to lose to all their human opponents. Because significant numbers of coaches still pick those games in out of conference, they often win few OOC

I dont see any upside - playing opponents with so few wins tubes RPI and SOS. Why do folks do this?

Agree. However there are times I forget to schedule and when that happens there are some seasons the engine loves having me play those sims.

I don't think it is cut and dried that scheduling sims is dumb.

There are sim-heavy mid and low major conferences, which means there will be a sim team that wins 18-22 games just by beating up on other sims. If you want an easy road win that won't kill your RPI/SOS, you find the SIM most likely to win that conference and schedule them.

I usually remember to schedule and would play nothing but human players with any teams that aren't rebuilding...but honestly I have a hard time scheduling all humans in some worlds given the populations. But I try to remember to at least go back and schedule decent sims during the CT in those cases.

Posted by grimacedance on 11/4/2017 2:52:00 PM (view original):
I don't think it is cut and dried that scheduling sims is dumb.

There are sim-heavy mid and low major conferences, which means there will be a sim team that wins 18-22 games just by beating up on other sims. If you want an easy road win that won't kill your RPI/SOS, you find the SIM most likely to win that conference and schedule them.

The OP is specifically talking about scheduling sims in Big 6 conferences.

decent SIMs that will win a bunch of games can be a good tactic in my opinion

I have seen teams beat up on sims, have a horrible SOS (in the mid 100s), yet are ranked. That is a definite strategy. Of course, that was in a mid major conference now that I think about it

Yep, beating up on SIMs that have a good chance to win their conferences and get a postseason berth will generally provide a boost to SOS and RPI, even more so if you play them on the road. I think people who schedule the Big 6 SIMS think they're worth scheduling because their SOS will be strong playing in a BIG 6 conference. What they don't consider is that the SIMs RPIs gets hammered when they go 1-26.

Decent sims on the road. It behooves HD to have some number of good sims, so as to attract new coaches willing to take them. So many sims are better these days, and not just through a sudden convergence of seniors.
TL

Posted by metsmax on 11/4/2017 2:06:00 PM (view original):
I continue to wonder why anyone schedules against SIMs in BCS confs

Those teams tend to win very few games. In conference, they tend to lose to all their human opponents. Because significant numbers of coaches still pick those games in out of conference, they often win few OOC

I dont see any upside - playing opponents with so few wins tubes RPI and SOS. Why do folks do this?

Because the world is full of not so smart people

Personally it's because it is probably the closest thing I will ever have again in my lifetime of seeing my craptacular D1 program actually being on the winning side of a scoreboard against those teams. If I close my eyes and imagine really hard, my dedicated band of 0's and 1's can almost make me forget that my real world future probably holds, if lucky, 10 wins against schools with compass directions or hyphens in their names followed by a nightly street beatdown and coach firing once the calendar rolls to 2018.

I do it because I am a lazy scheduler and its fun for me playing the name teams versus other random Sims. I mostly always schedule SIMs other than regional OOC teams. But, I am lazy and just want to get the scheduling out of the way so I can focus on Recruiting, Game plan, or whatever else. Probably a disservice to my conference mates....but the RPI usually works itself out in conference.

Sometimes I will do it if most of the players on the SIM team were recruited by a human coach who recently left. Those teams aren't bad. An all SIM recruited roster gets a pass in a mostly human conference.

In preseason I play Big 6 SIM schools so that come NT time I can gauge things based on a common opponent if I meet a team from that conference.