When I caught up with him in Dallas last week at Big 12 media days, Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw mentioned a statistic he had recently heard that got me thinking.

"You want an interesting stat? Big 12 teams, on average this year, will play 9.8 games against the Power 5," McCaw said. "SEC teams, on average, are going to play 8.8 games against Power 5."

His calculations are correct, too.

Let’s take another step and add it up for each Power 5 conference.

Pac-12: 9.8 (118/12)

Big 12: 9.8 (98/10)

ACC: 9.4 (132/14)

Big Ten: 9.2 (129/14)

SEC: 8.8 (123/14)

Sure, there are a variety of ways in which one can interpret that data. The Pac-12 can take credit for being at the top of this list. The ACC can boast that an impressive 35 percent of its non-conference games are against Power 5 opponents. The Big Ten should feel good about being at 30 percent, too.

But I think what McCaw is getting at -- and I think it’s a topic we could be revisiting plenty in November -- is this: The SEC might be getting a pass for its non-conference efforts.

Eighty percent of the SEC's non-conference games will feature Group of 5 or FCS foes. Only one program in the SEC (South Carolina) has 10 Power 5 teams on its schedule. In the Big 12, seven members are playing 10 or more, including preseason favorite TCU.

Baylor's non-conference scheduling will continue to get ridiculed until it gets better, and McCaw knows that. He's trying to change their approach. But the Bears are still playing just as many Power 5 games (nine) as most of the SEC will this season.

Will this small disparity have any effect on the way College Football Playoff committee members compare teams of equal records? The Big 12 -- and its one extra Power 5 game, on average -- better hope so.

This is what Bob Bowlsby was talking about last year when he said the Big 12 needs to effectively communicate why its round-robin format is best. The dispute about the title tiebreaker distracted from this last season, no question. But now that "data points" are part of the CFP lexicon, the 9.8 average is data the Big 12 might want to embrace.