Yes. Both JT and Coop (who is partly responsible for many of these OOC games) had it right, but for different reasons.
As JT says, you have to play these types of games in order to get better.
The plus side to playing a Texas, USC, Va Tech, or Miami Fla is that, barring a Tennessee-esque collapse, you know exactly what the opponent will bring four or five years into the future, the coaching staff can sell the upcoming four or five seasons worth of nationally televised games to the recruits, and taking a loss won't hurt unless there are multiple unbeatens.
As Coop used to say, there is nothing to gain and everything to lose by playing the bottom feeders, especially in-state. You don't want to be known as the coach responsible for Ohio State's first loss to Akron since 1894.
Scheduling Div-1AA teams is an obvious SoS/Comp Poll killer, and scheduling mid-majors has become russian roulette. When schedules are made out five years in advance, a team like Wisconsin isn't worried about Cincinnati, Kansas State isn't worried about Marshall, Missouri doesn't think twice about visiting Troy. Heck, six or seven years ago, not one coach or AD in the country would have cringed about the thought of scheduling Boise St., Fresno St., and UTEP on consecutive weeks in the same season.
In college football, there is such a thing about losing pretty and losing ugly. As we've seen since the formation of the BCS, the difference between two pretty loses versus one ugly one costs a programs' conference $13.5M. Losing early in the season to a good opponent will not hurt you, and that's a proven fact. A pretty loss versus the ugly upset is the difference between falling from 5 to 10 in the Top-25 versus falling from 5 to unranked.
The only way it can hurt is if you don't win any of the big OOC games, then it becomes a Cooper-like "2-10-1" problem.
