At Goff Rugby Report we give a lot of credence to a team's tough schedule when it comes to rankings.

We give you credit if your team tries to find good competition, and even more if you beat that competition, or play them close. Sometimes we get questions about how we could possibly ranka specific team so low, and the answer is often the same - beat a strong team, and we'll move you up. 

In the past couple of years we've seen more and more colleges look to challenge themselves. We'd like to think the motivation is simply because excellent comes from the desire to attain excellence, and risk losing games because of it, but we think there's more to it than that. For some teams, where they rank in the D1A official rankings dictates their playoff matchups (or whether they make the playoffs at all). For other teams, maybe they would like to be ranked a little higher in these GRR pages - and, like we said, you've got to playing good teams to be compared to good teams.

So this got us to thinking, who does have the toughest schedule? We decided to figure it out. We looked at the schedule of a large number of DI-level teams and gave them points for playing ranked teams (more points for playing a top-ten team, somewhat less for 11-25, and a little less, but still some credit, for playing a team ranked 26-50). In addition, teams got points for playing strong foreign competition.

Now, remember, it doesn't matter if you win those games, only that you played them. It's ranking the schedule, not the results.

So click here to see the teams with the toughest schedules.