Poll Dancing: Week Four, or Seminole Wind

September 26, 2011 by 4 Comments

With each passing week, the task of assigning value to cumulative wins and losses becomes more and more difficult.  I don’t envy the coaches who contribute to the poll as they rack their brains each week to remember which grad assistant they assigned to fill out the ballots this year.

Last week, Florida State seemed to be punished a bit too much for losing to the #1 ranked team in the country, especially when compared to other teams who were dropped similarly for losing to far inferior opponents.  And this week, the Seminoles went and lost again and again they fell the standard 10 spots that had, up until now, been the standard sentence for not being the best team on the field on a particular day.

To be fair, FSU is the only 2-loss team still ranked, although they teeter precariously at #24.  They have also lost by 10 to the #1 team at home and by 5 to the #15 team on the road.  The teams they have beaten (Louisiana-Monroe and Charleston Southern) are laughers, but at least they blew them out.

It’s hard for me to believe I’m taking up the mantle for a team that I despise to the point that they are essentially well-tanned Wolverines in my eyes, but that’s how terrible a job the coaches are doing.  Let’s take a look at some of the teams ranked ahead of FSU:

#23 West Virginia

This week, the Mountaineers lost to #3 (now tied at #2) LSU at home by 26, nearly double the combined margin of both of Florida State’s losses.  Yet, WVU dropped just 7 spots while the Seminoles have fallen a total of 19.  West Virginia’s wins?  1-3 Marshall, Norfolk State (which I’m pretty sure is a railroad college), and 1-2 Maryland, a team that just got BEAT. DOWN. by Temple.

#18 Arkansas

The Razorbacks also lost to a top team this week, the other half of that #2 tie Alabama.  Arkansas’ loss was on the road and only by 24, so they just dropped 6 spots.  The Razorbacks have beaten 1-2 Troy, 0-4 New Mexico (who just lost to Sam Houston State even though I’m pretty sure there is no state named Sam OR Houston), and 0-4 Missouri State (even though I’m pretty sure there is no state named Missouri).

#13 Texas A&M

Maybe you could make an argument for the SEC-bound Aggies since their loss this weekend was just a one-point home drop to #6 Oklahoma State.  For this, A&M fell only 5 spots.  The Aggies’ wins are against 3-1 SMU and 1-3 Idaho.

Here we have three teams who all lost to top-10 opponents and dropped no more than 7 spots in the poll.  Yet, when FSU lost to a top-1 opponent last week, they dropped 9 spots–and then another 10 this week for losing to a top-15 opponent.  None of these teams has a signature win against a good opponent, so there’s no “body of work” argument in play.  For some reason, the ‘Noles losses are being treated more harshly than similar losses by other teams.

This Week’s Laughing Stocks by Conference

ACC – Maryland, N.C. State, Virginia

Big 12 – Dan Beebe

Big East – Toledo/Syracuse replay officials, West Virginia, West Virginia

 

Big Ten – Minnesota

 

Filed Under: BCS

Poll Dancing: Week Three, or My Assistant Wrote This Subtitle for Me

September 19, 2011 by 3 Comments

There really is nothing like the pageantry and tradition of college football.  Of course, by “pageantry” I mean landscape-shattering conference realignment, and by “tradition” I mean the arrival of the autumn Notice of Inquiry.  There was also some football to be played, although no one bothered to tell Joe Bauserman.

In keeping with their general rule of not even faking it anymore, the Coaches’ Poll knocked Florida State down the requisite ~10 spots from #5 to #14 for losing to the #1 team in the country.  For the sake of comparison, Ohio State was dropped from #16 to #26 for losing to a team that still isn’t even ranked, and somehow managed to snag 53 fewer points in the poll than the offensively offensive Buckeyes this week.  On top of that, Michigan State handed Notre Dame their first win of the year and dropped from #15 to #23.  Those three losses couldn’t be any more different and yet they each get the exact same treatment from the coaches, who once again simply bumped everyone else up to fill in FSU’s vacated spot.

Like clockwork, Michigan joins the poll at #21 just so we can all pretend to be so very shocked when they tank in the Big Ten.  And the ACC gets some poll love this week with newcomers #22 Clemson, #24 Georgia Tech, and #25 North Carolina.  This is most likely because many voters thought they had been accepted into the conference as well.

This week’s poll is perhaps the most glaring recent example of how insulting the BCS system is.  There was clearly no thought put into the rankings this week, and the Florida State drop is particularly maddening.  Shouldn’t there be some consideration for scheduling big-name opponents?  There is no SOS consideration in the BCS formula except for the assumption that voters think about it when filling out their ballots.  Has that vanished from the coaches’ poll?  Was it ever there?

Expand, conferences, expand.  You’re our only hope.

 

Filed Under: BCS

The Spelling BeeCS

September 7, 2011 by 9 Comments

Borrowed from here.

What If Everything Worked Like BCS: The Spelling Bee from sanjeev tandle on Vimeo.

Filed Under: BCS, College Football

Poll Dancing: Week One, or Brian Kelly’s Vocabulary Corner

September 6, 2011 by 2 Comments

As both of my readers are probably aware, I have a few firm, unwavering beliefs.  One is that there are actually two people who regularly read this feature, and another is that college football coaches are the last people who should have any influence over who is elected to the BCS title game outside of the actual coaching of their teams.  This is not because I don’t think coaches understand football; in fact, they understand it better than pretty much anyone else on the planet, except maybe pigskin wizard Fat Urkel.

The problem, oustside of the conflict of interest inherent in allowing those who stand to benefit from the system to have direct and substantial control over it with very little transparency, is that coaches simply can’t watch other games during the week.  All they know is who won and who lost and maybe a little bit about the opponents of those teams.

Which is why in the first poll of the year based on something other than complete conjecture, there are clear patterns.  If a team from the preseason poll lost, they dropped about 10 spots (Georgia and Oregon each dropped 10, TCU dropped 11) unless they were Notre Dame, who apparently gets double-whacked for being Notre Dame.  Or maybe their 20-spot plummet has something to do with this f***ing bulls***.

If you’re one of the teams that beat those ranked teams and you weren’t ranked before, then congratulations!  You are now!  But not too high, because you might lose next week, and we’re trying not to look stupid here.  Therefore, this week sees the arrival of #20 Baylor and #22 South Florida.  Neither of these teams plays anyone of interest for a few weeks, so they’ll make perfect candidates for the inaugural FraudWatch list (see below).

Now, if you were already ranked and beat a ranked team, you’re still going to move up but just a little bit because hey, we actually kind of got something right here, why mess with it?  Hence, LSU moves up two spots for beating Oregon and Boise State jumps up a notch for offing Georgia.  Potential season storyline:  You can only win in an ugly uniform if you you let mentally challenged chimpanzees design it.

Let’s say you had a nice win and were ranked abnormally low in the preseason poll because you have a big question mark like a new ex-baseball-playing starting QB (Wisconsin) or a new head coach (Florida, West Virginia) or both (Ohio State).  That’s good for a bump of around four spots.  Hey look, there’s prototypical random SEC team Mississippi State, let’s bump them up four spots too!

Don’t worry, traditional power teams who didn’t make the preseason poll and did nothing noteworthy over the weekend, you get to fill in the gaps!  Enjoy those shiny new numerical prefixes, #23 Penn State and #24 Texas!

Coming Soon: FraudWatch!

A couple of years ago, I came up with a way to help identify “fraud teams,” defining the term as teams who open a season with four or five wins and then end up with five or more losses.  Sometimes this can happen because of ill-timed injuries or other flukes.  But often, the teams just aren’t that good and have benefited from close wins and weak schedules.  Originally, I limited my list to teams that were undefeated in week five, but this year I’ll open it up to one-lossers as well, to increase my chances of making embarrassingly wrong selections.

Filed Under: BCS, College Football

Expandageddon Finally Here?

August 13, 2011 by 8 Comments

Although they have yet to put anything up on their website, ESPN has been reporting this morning that Texas A&M will announce on Monday that they are joining the SEC and Missouri, Clemson, and Florida State may be making the move with them, creating the type of Mega-Conference that the Pac-10 narrowly missed out on last year before anticlimactically adding Utah and Colorado.  Should this come to pass, the question then becomes how quickly will the rest of the dominoes fall?

It’s unlikely that Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott will sit back for long and let the SEC steal his thunder.  If A&M and Missouri are gone, the thin ice holding up the Big 12 will almost certainly crack.  Scott would love to get his hands on Oklahoma and Texas and would probably take Texas Tech and Oklahoma State as well, essentially giving him the same conference he almost had last summer.

And then, of course, there’s the Big Ten’s Jim Delany, who walked away the clear winner with Nebraska and a new championship game in last year’s round of expansion.  After finally bringing his old-fashioned conference up to date, how likely is he to let two other leagues render the move immediately obsolete?  Everyone knows that the conference wants Notre Dame.  Some other schools that were reportedly on the table last summber include the ACC’s Maryland and the Big East’s Rutgers and Pittsburgh.  The important thing about those last schools is that they are members of the AAU, which is essentially a requirement for Big Ten membership (Nebraska lost their spot after the move had already been finalized).  Notre Dame would be an exception, but one that the conference has already made clear it would be willing to make.

At that point, it won’t be difficult for the ACC and Big East to see the writing on the wall.  Having lost teams to both the SEC and the Big Ten, the two conferences would eventually settle on what would basically be a merger, as the two conferences will have exactly 16 teams remaining between them.

Perhaps the only true wild card in all of this is Boise State.  A solid performer on the field in recent years, the Broncos still haven’t been able to attract the attention of major conferences.  They arrive in the Mountain West just in time to watch all the good teams bail out.  With no real bargaining chips aside from winning a lot of games (their TV market ranks 113th in CFB markets, below Youngstown State and Massachusetts), this time the BCS might bust them.

Not surprisingly, the Big 12 will end up being the biggest loser here and may even cease to exist entirely.  Their four remaining teams (Baylor, Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa State) may find a home with the Mountain West or another mid-major angling for a power position.  But the moves at this level will be largely irrelevant.

Why?  Perhaps the most important piece in the New CFB Order fell into place yesterday, as the Pac-12 and Big Ten agreed on a Plus-One post-season format that would pit the top four teams (presumably by BCS-style rating system) against each other in a two-round bowl-based playoff.  When you put that together with four 16-team Mega-Conferences, who may seek to alter the NCAA rules and play as four divisions with a two-round conference championship playoff, you’re suddenly looking at a four-round, 16-team national playoff, as it’s unlikely that anyone from outside the Mega Four would be able to get a top 4 ranking.

Filed Under: BCS, College Football Tagged With: , ,

Poll Dancing 2011: Pre-Season Pretenders

August 4, 2011 by 1 Comment

The Pre-Season Coaches’ Poll was released this morning, instantly closing off the BCS Championship to around 85% of FBS teams.  This year’s edition sets up Oklahoma and Alabama to face off for the title and I eagerly anticipate that matchup as I fondly look back on last year’s Alabama/Ohio State battle and 2009’s Florida/Texas bout.  Of the 10 teams ranked in the top two of this poll in the past five years, only 3 have actually made it to the title game.

Of course, figuring out who the best two teams will be before any games have been played isn’t easy, but even if we open up the range to teams in the pre-season top five, we only add 3 more to the list.  And in what has to be their worst job at guessing who’s good ever, last year’s actual title matchup featured the pre-season #’s 11 and 23.

I’m not even going to pretend that I know how the coaches fill out their ballots (although here is some footage of Chip Kelly making his selection), but I am going to pretend that I know which picks they got wrong.  Here are my picks for which teams in the Top 10 will lose at least 2 games this year.

#2 Alabama

The Tide faces four road games against teams ranked in the pre-season poll:  Penn State, Florida, Mississippi State and Auburn.

#4 LSU

The Tigers open with a neutral-site game against Oregon.  Even if LSU pulls it off, they still have consecutive road games against Mississippi State and West Virginia and host Florida in game six.  The back half gets a little easier but still features a visit to Alabama two weeks after taking on Auburn.

#5 Florida State

After a laughable two-game head start featuring Louisiana-Monroe and Charleston Southern, the Seminoles host Oklahoma, who will likely still hold the top spot coming into the game.  Last year’s visit to OU was the first really big non-conference game FSU has played in a while and the Sooners blasted them in that one.  The next week they travel to take on Clemson, a team they struggle with on the road and then follow up a bye week with two more road games (albeit against Wake Forest and Duke).  The season closes out with a road game against the rival Gators, looking for some revenge for last year’s 31-7 FSU win.

#7 Boise State

Unfortunately for the Broncos, moving to the Mountain West isn’t going to give them any extra benefit of the doubt.  If they can go unbeaten, they may have a shot at a title spot, but they’ll still be subject to the mid-major One Strike And You’re Out rule.  That strike could come as early as week one when they take on Georgia in Atlanta, or a little later with two consecutive road games against old WAC foe Fresno State and an improved Colorado State.  But the real trouble spot is a visit from TCU followed by a trip to San Diego State.

#8 Oklahoma State & #9 Texas A&M

These two are together because they play each other on September 24th and unless Texas decides otherwise, one of them has to lose.  If Oklahoma State wins, they still have consecutive road games against Texas and Missouri, a visit to Texas Tech and a home game against a possibly undefeated Oklahoma ahead of them.  If the Aggies win, they go immediately into a neutral site game against Arkansas and a road trip to Texas Tech.  Later, they get Oklahoma on the road and host Texas to close out the season.

#10 Wisconsin

If Russell Wilson clicks in a system that isn’t really designed for his skill set, the Badgers could be in for a magical season.  If not, an early game against Oregon State could prove tricky.  More harrowing is the season-ending gauntlet featuring 4 road games out of 6, including back-to-back trips to Michigan State and Ohio State.  Penn State visits to wrap things up.

The Breakdown

Here is the number of teams from each conference featured in the poll:

SEC – 8 (66% of conference)
Big 12 – 5 (50% of conference)
Big Ten – 5 (42% of conference)
Mt. West – 2 (25% of conference)
Pac 12 – 2 (17% of conference)
ACC – 2 (17% of conference)

There are no teams from the Big East or any mid-major conference outside of the Mt. West included in the poll.

Filed Under: BCS, College Football

The Last Days of the BCS?

June 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany’s recent advocacy of “cost-of-attendance” scholarships for athletes that would include additional funds to cover things like travel expenses and clothing was seen by many critics as a response to the current memorabilia scandal at Ohio State.  However, the idea is not exclusive to Delany and he’s not even the first major player to talk about it this year.  Current NCAA president Mark Emmert is all for it, as is SEC commissioner Mike Slive.  The Big 12 is meeting this week, and sure enough, the topic is very much a part of the discussion there.  It’s hard to imagine that the ACC and especially the newly-loaded Pac-12 would be against it.  Heck, South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier wants to pay the kids directly out of his World’s Greatest Golf Courses novelty checkbook.  In all likelihood, more than 75% of the current BCS automatic-qualifiers would quickly get behind this idea.

The not-so-hidden truth at the bottom of all this is that some schools and conferences can clearly afford such a move, while others clearly cannot.  Once again, we find ourselves up against the age-old battle between the Haves and the Have-Nots.  With the BCS facing its highest degree of opposition since inception, perhaps the time has come for Division IA (or FBS, if you’re a communist) to finally have that operation.

With last off-season’s thrilling Big Ten/Pac-10 expansion-fest coming to fruition this fall (and the Big East’s next fall and perhaps beyond), most of the best “mid-major” teams will be in AQ conferences or competing as BCS-friendly independents.  The only noticeable out-lier at this point is Boise State, who I guarantee would be welcomed into the Big East in a heartbeat if everyone could get over the travel issue (TCU isn’t exactly nearby anyway).  If the Big 12 decides they miss their championship game, that would be a more viable potential landing spot for the Broncos.  And, of course, we should never rule out independence; after all, nothing says iconoclast quite like a blue football field.

Even with just the current four 12-team conferences, the 10-team Big 12, a 10-team Big East (which appears to be the minimum goal) and four independents, that’s 72 teams that could compete as a new upper level of college football, with any type of post-season they want.  (Conveniently, there were 35 bowl games last year, and a couple more in the works.)  It’s worth mentioning that a BCS-style concept would probably be a lot more palatable under this set-up than it is in the current format, and a small playoff would be much easier to keep from ballooning out of control with a significantly smaller pool of teams to draw from.  Regardless of which direction is ultimately settled on, the BCS name is tainted and should be abandoned immediately.

What about those mid-major schools that get left out?  Conventional wisdom is that they would merge with at least a portion of IAA (FCS, komrade) and participate in an NCAA-sanctioned post-season playoff, which is exactly what they wanted anyway, right?  At the grown-ups table, we could finally put an end to the embarrassing cupcake-fest that pollutes the beginning of every season and get more interesting and competitive games on the schedule.  Everybody wins.

Filed Under: BCS, College Football, Ohio State Football Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Complete Madness

April 4, 2011 by 8 Comments

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s website ran an article that offered up a “conversion bracket” simulating a March Madness-style playoff for football, based on last year’s pre-bowl rankings and this year’s basketball tournament.  The purpose of this exercise is to convince us that a football playoff would be bad because insane upsets would land Air Force in the Final Four.

There are number of flaws in this argument, the most glaring being the fact that football and basketball are remarkably different sports, especially in terms of pace and relative ease of scoring.  What it takes to pull off an upset in basketball is not at all the same as what it takes to pull off an upset in football.  Also keep in mind that this year’s basketball tournament is an anomaly of epic proportions.  Never before has a Final Four not contained at least one #1 or #2 seed.  Never.  Using the results of this tournament as a basis for what a football playoff would bring is disingenuous at best.

With that in mind, I turned to the infinitely awesome simulation site WhatIfSports.com to get a more realistic outcome of the Journal’s flight of fancy.  Check out the results below.  I’ll post the Final Four results in the comments, but feel free to speculate about what you think would happen.

Filed Under: BCS, Ohio State Football

BCSketball?

March 15, 2011 by 4 Comments

Saint Mary’s basketball coach Randy Bennett was a upset Sunday upon learning that his team was apparently not one of the 68 best in nation. So upset, in fact, that he uttered one of the more nonsensical things heard that day (at least until Celebrity Apprentice hit the air): “Go to BCS. Go to something where there’s a standardized number how you figure out who’s in, who’s not.” The suggestion being that at least with the BCS, you know where you stand, there’s no mysterious group of people deciding your fate and…

…Wait, what?

All Bennett has proven with this comment is that he doesn’t understand how the BCS works. The system is at least two-thirds opinion–opinions of sportswriters or whoever votes in the Harris Poll, opinions of coaches who can’t even reasonably watch enough games to know what they’re talking about and then won’t even share their final votes with us. And it’s only two-thirds opinion if you buy that computer algorithms designed by humans (and most of which are not available for public dissection) are somehow free of bias or unable to be manipulated. Mysterious enough for you?

Bennett wants to rid tournament selection of human error, a noble goal, but also an impossible one. How exactly does one determine when “human error” has been made, especially in this case? What demonstrable method is available to illustrate the obvious (to Bennett anyway) truth that Saint Mary’s belongs in the tournament? There is none. Attempting to do so only opens a series of progressively absurd cans of worms:

What makes a schedule “strong”?
What makes an opponent “quality”?
What makes a team “deserving”?

Coach Bennett would argue that as long as every team is playing by the same rules, it doesn’t matter. But that’s impossible too. A Big East schedule is, by any reasonable measure, always going to be “tougher” than an Ivy League schedule. Right out of the gate, we’ve got favoritism.

That’s why the March Madness system is the best solution. All conference champions are included. That’s the most important step. Win your conference and you get a shot at the title. The power is entirely in each individual team’s hands and it’s 100% fair. If you can’t do that, you have no right to complain. You failed to secure your berth, and are now at the mercy of the at-large process, which in this case is a selection committee. If you want to make a case that the makeup of the committee is flawed, I would certainly listen and probably agree with you.

I would love to hear Bennett’s idea of a system for choosing at-large spots that would make everyone happy. But the truth is, no one wants to be left out, and it doesn’t really matter how you get left out or how many got in ahead of you. Expand the tournament to 96, 128, or 256 (Kinko’s has a deal on bracket binding) and you’ll still have someone fuming that their 20-loss team didn’t make it.

Filed Under: BCS, College Basketball
« Previous Page