First I’m going to outline a premise for why this post was necessary. Second, I’m going to address your specific concern (and indicate my agreement!) that conference comparisons without context are worse than useless. Then, I’m going to indicate why this particular FP doesn’t fall into that category and why it’s actually beneficial to have seen these tables. Onward!

It sounds like you and NorcalNick are tired of talking about conference rankings. I presume, however, that you enjoy it when Cal takes on opponents in other major conferences, such as Tennessee, Illinois, Michigan St., Kansas St., or Maryland to name a few. Such road games give you and many other Cal fans a chance to travel to a part of the country you might never otherwise visit (okay, Manhattan, KS not so much, but I hear great things about Champaign-Urbana!). But the weekends aren’t about the travel; they’re actually about the games. And one team will win and one team will lose. Which means as long you have inter-conference games, some sort of conference comparison will be unavoidable. Unless you want to mandate that no score be kept, or that all inter-conference games be treated as ties no matter the result or just never play out-of-conference games, you will be forced to live in a world of conference rankings. Furthermore, in week 3, it’s hard to have an intelligent discussion of conference play because many teams haven’t even played a conference game. So we turn to whatever discussion we can have which tends to be the one involving teams from different conferences playing each other.

Put succinctly, when you agree to play an inter-conference game you implicitly agree to the conference comparisons that accompany the result.
 
Now we can agree for a second. Norcalnick’s rant and your own lament echo one another fairly well:

I hate reading headlines that seem to indicate that somehow Maryland or UNLV somehow beat an entire conference yesterday. It just feels like provincialism and low-grade, lazy analysis is taking over in place of meaningful, ‘how does team A stack up against team B’ analysis.

So when I see YET ANOTHER POST comparing incomplete Pac 10 and SEC records completely sans context and trying to determine which is "better" it pushes my buttons. Shrug.

Agreed 100%. Drawing absolute conclusions based on a sample-size of 1 or 2 pieces of data is something that should only be reserved for Presidential elections and not serious matters like college football. Pieces that draw extended conclusions based around such small data sets are literally a waste of time. And while I’m biased, I say confidently this post doesn’t fall into that category.

Sans context? The context couldn’t be more clearly defined. These are the inter-conference records for the 10 complete years of the BCS era. Incomplete? The complete records of all six BCS conferences against every I-A conference and all I-AA teams are presented. If I was only posting based on this weekend’s events then you’d be on to something.

This data on the other hand represents 10 years of out-of-conference play. That’s 145 BCS conference opponents for the Pac-10 and 348 games overall. It’d be wrong to say anything is defined by this data because it’s not. But it sure is easy to spot trends within it, and whether your realize it or not, it’s actually what you’re doing when you – or anyone else – offer the opinion that "USC is really good, and the Pac-10 is not that bad." Something that you have seen or read must have caused that opinion to take root in your mind. These stats offer the confirmation of what you rightly suspected so that when someone else asserts that “Playing in the SEC is kind of like creating the Earth in six days except tougher” you can call bulls***.

I appreciate that I might have been more rah-rah Pac-10 on this post than I’d be if I were doing this for an academic study, but I figured the context was appropriate. Too, I may just be more interested in this stuff because I live in the South and so am in a perpetual ‘yes it is; no it ain’t!’ argument with my friends and co-workers. Nonetheless, I still believe this data actually says something, so that’s why I chose to share it with you.

Not to forget the immacuately dressed Steve Nash, or demented Nobel Prize winner John Nash, or CBS’s hit drama Nash Bridges.

Man, how times have changed. I remember when he was bronze painted man.