Faithful reader Yakub² pointed out to me the other day that four of our 2010 opponents are coming off of bye weeks leading up to our game. This fact intrigued me. Another FTRS lurker, Jerry J., asked me, "When was the last time we didn't have a home Thursday Night Game?" I looked it up and it was 2002, Chan's freshman year. We also missed out on Thursday Night Lights in 1998.

Odd segue time... Going back to Yakub's point, we are looking at a tough back end on our 2010 schedule. To illustrate the point, I made a graph showing the 2009 winning percentage of our 2010 schedule opponents.


The navy blocks represent the 2009 I-A winning percentage for each opponent each week of the 2010 season. The gold line is a running sum of the winning percentages from 2009 over the 2010 season. It shows two clear plateaus - an easy start to our 2010 season and a tough finish. It's a mountain to climb, if you will.

I also wanted to look at the schedule a way in which furrer4heisman does every year. He looks at days rest for your team, days rest for your opponent, and your opponents preceding opponent. This can show you roughly how prepared, up or down, and generally beat up a team should be leading up to the GT game.


After looking at it from the Hokie perspective, I like our schedule. We don't take many breaks (like 2009) as we plow from game to game to game, which will probably hurt us along the lines in injuries. But we never have to cool down our offense. Our bye week is even cut short by a Thursday night danceoff in Blacksburg. The climaxing difficulty of the schedule makes each game even more critical as the season progresses. We'll be ranked higher from a soft start so our later, bigger games will have a higher likelihood of national television. It's almost too perfect.

Let me know your thoughts on this fine Sunday afternoon.