You asked about match vs. safety vs. reach. This is just an example of how I saw it two years ago for my high stats kid. He liked small colleges. He had a generous number of match schools lined up. We thought that if he were not accepted to a college in the ED round, there was an increased chance of being rejected from his high matches in the RD round, once there were fewer openings. Hence, he had not only true statistical matches, like Middlebury and Emory are for you (I call them ‘high matches’) but also ‘low matches.’
Thanks to CC, we knew that the ‘holistic’ aspect of the schools listed here as ‘low matches’ meant that they could not be counted on as safeties, even though his stats were in their top 25th percentile. He wanted to have more options than his safeties in the end, and having a large number of match colleges increased that possibility.
His strategy was to apply ED to a reasonable reach, which worked out for him.
Simultaneously, he EA’d to his safeties. I say the word ‘safeties’ with full respect for the colleges, which are many people’s top choice colleges and where I think he would have been quite happy. He was not considering any “auto-admit-by-stats” safety. What mattered to him more than anything was smart peers, so even his safeties were highly competitive colleges (such as Maryland- College Park is for you). By applying to Binghamton and Clark early action, he would have had time to adjust his strategy if he had experienced a surprise rejection.
High reach: Brown, Princeton.
Reasonable reach: Amherst, Bowdoin, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, Williams (ED).
High match: Bates, Colgate, Hamilton, Middlebury, Vassar. (One of these might have received an ED2 if he had not been accepted to Williams ED1.)
Low match: Brandeis, Connecticut College, Franklin & Marshall, Lafayette, Skidmore. (In retrospect, he has stated that he would not have applied to F&M and Lafayette in the end. He loved Skidmore, and it, along with Brandeis and Conn, matched his personality better than the other low matches.)
Reasonably safe options: Clark, SUNY Binghamton
An extra, greater safety possibility that might have been added if he had experienced some rejections in the EA/ED1 round: SUNY Geneseo.
What people are suggesting to you is that your matches carry some risk because they are competitive. To almost guarantee yourself an option to weigh against College Park in the end, add some ‘low match’ colleges.