[NU Sports] Our non-conference schedule

[John Labbe]

>What I really think we need to do is schedule non-conference opponents for
>recruiting purposes. We compete every year for a very small number of
>academically capable I-A football recruits. Therefore, it only makes sense to
>schedule the schools we recruit against and then go out and beat them. That is
>what will sway a kid from picking one of the other academic options. 
>
>That being said, I think the candidate schools are:
>Stanford 
>Vanderbilt
>Rice
>Duke
>Wake Forest 
>Boston College
>SMU?
>Tulane?
>Virgina?
>

I have to agree with Mike Nolan on this one.  For a moment, I thought this analysis made sense.  But you're assuming that the "academically capable" recruits will only choose to attend the best academic universities possible.  In reality, the recruits we're interested in are likely to be at least equally interested in the quality of the football program.  Just because a good high school football player is also smart and does well in school doesn't mean he won't want to play at Ohio State if he has designs on being on a possible national championship team, for instance (which is a pretty typical aspiration, I'd say).

As long as we're consistently better than the teams you list above, it won't matter whether we play them or not.  I think the biggest thing we can try to do to improve recruiting is to have a consistently good team that routinely goes to bowl games.  The fact that we have a great school and play in the Big Ten are our two inherent qualities, but will never be enough if we don't do well on the field (regardless of who our non-conf opponents are, in my view).