At least this year the Gators didn’t help their Strength of Schedule.
True that. One thing I'll give the FSU boss folks is they regularly schedule tough teams that are usually a strong SOS. This year they even scheduled LSU as a big non-conference team to go along with their usual Florida tough non-conference team (along with conference opponents Clemson and Miami). So kudos to them for trying to have a strong schedule where nobody could claim that FSU plays only wuss teams.
But of all of those teams FSU scheduled and played, only LSU was good enough to be ranked in the final rankings (then Louisville later in the ACC championship game). If you look at the final rankings, FSU played only 2 of those teams. Compare that to other teams:
Penn State played 2 of them and lost 1.
Missouri played 4 of them and lost 2.
Oregon played 2 of them (one of them twice) and lost 2.
Ohio State played 3 of them and lost 2.
Georgia played 4 of them and lost 1 (by only 3 points to Bama).
Alabama played 5 of them and lost 1.
Texas played 4 of them and lost 1.
Washington played 2 of them (one of them twice) and lost 0.
Michigan played 3 of them and lost 0.
By those numbers, IMHO the 4 best teams are 1) Bama, 2)Texas, T3) Michigan, and T3) Georgia. After that it'd be 5) Washington, 6) FSU.