I'll say what I am thinking and you can agree or not -
Before RT destroyed my love for college baseball, I often complained Clemson had figured out a much better way of scheduling OOC than we did. For a national title contender in that sport, there was a big tier drop of opponents from the top 35 or 40 or so to 45 and below.
Clemson scheduled lots of OOC opponents in the 40-75 range. For a top 5 team, they were functionally not much different than playing someone in the 100's, but MUCH better for computer rankings. It would frustrate me to no end that their coaches understood this, while our coach would schedule the 150 teams*, so we would often find ourselves a few spots behind in the end of year computer rankings, despite a much more impressive performance against peer teams, including Clemson.
In women's basketball, an elite contender faces a "we could lose this" tier drop around 12 to 15 or so, and there is arguably a tier within the top 15, especially if you're playing them at home. A hypothetical conference schedule that provides lots of opponents in the 12-50 range would give many Q1 wins, while providing few of the "uh oh. Better come ready to play!" challenges of a conference schedule with many teams in the 4 to 15 range.
Hypothetically speaking.
* at least we never gave that limited baseball coach another job that required understanding anything more complex than "should I pull that starter?" Could you even imagine!
