Hard to get you folks excited about a conference schedule discussion during a pandemic which may force the cancellation of the season.  This, however, will not stop me from trying.

My very unscientific study attempts to weight the strengths and weaknesses of each school's home and home schedule.  So, this has nothing to do with one's complete conference schedule.

It is always risky to weight team based on how they performed in a prior season but since this is how the NFL determines its strength of schedule, borrowing from this in theory will have to be good enough.  Where I stop short is in tallying won-loss records.  Why would anyone think, for an example, that Dayton will go 18-0 again?

Instead, I have divided the conference into four uneven quadrants and assigned a point score for each quadrant.  Quadrant 1 has four schools who each went at least 12-6 in the conference last year..Dayton, Rhode Island, Richmond and St. Louis.  There isn't much reason to think that each will not be among the conference's top programs again.  These are our 4 point schools.  Next are the three programs who went 11-7 or 10-8 in the conference last year..Duquesne, St. Bonaventure and Davidson.  I've assigned 3 points to these schools.  UMASS looks like a program on the rise but for now, they along with VCU will be assigned 2 points based on their 8-10 conference records.  Finally, as they said on Gilligan's Island, there's the "and the rest" 1 point schools of La Salle, GW, Mason, St. Joe's and Fordham.  Each was 6-12 or worse last season.

When we add up the point totals of each school's home and away opponents, there are some interesting findings.  From most difficult to least difficult, we have the following:

VCU 16
Dayton 14
St. Louis 14
Saint Bonaventure 13
GW  12
Duquesne 12
La Salle 12
Rhode Island 12
Saint Joe's 12
Davidson 11
UMASS 11
Richmond 11
Fordham 10
Mason  10

Not that I'm shedding any tears, but if I'm a VCU fan, I am really not happy.  3 home and aways with 4's (Dayton, URI and Richmond), another with a 3 (Davidson), and the 5th with what may be the best of the 1's (Mason).  They were only 8-10 in the conference last year.

Davidson, Richmond and UMASS should be vying for seeding while enjoying the benefit of softer home and aways.  UMASS may hjave the advantage here as they play home and aways with 3 of the 1's (Fordham, La Salle and Mason) which could easily result in 5 or 6 wins.

GW has the same home and aways as last year except for swapping out Richmond in exchange for Dayton.  About a wash on paper although GW has historically had great success against Dayton when playing at home while GW can't seem to beat Richmond anywhere these days after dominating the Spiders for a long time.