Bowl season gets all the glory for comparing the relative strength of conferences. There’s decent reason for that, as it’s an opportunity to see rare out-of-conference matchups, featuring ideally, the best teams a conference has to offer. However, it’s not the only time when teams compete against each other, out-of-conference.
The out of conference schedule is actually a more effective way of separating the success of individual conferences, because there’s a larger sample size from it.
Of course, teams schedule FCS programs for an easy win. Power 5 programs schedule Group of 5 teams for what they expect to be an easy win.