Big Ten Fan

This is where I'm at. Regular Season OOC vs. Power 5: Pac-12: 8-3 ACC: 9-7 SEC: 5-6 Big XII: 4-6 B1G: 6-11 The regular season numbers can be skewed by mismatched opponents. That is, a good team from one conference playing a bad team from another conference. Still, the Pac-12 was the best by a wide margin. Bowl Season (so far): Pac-12: 6-1 SEC: 6-5 Big Ten: 5-5 ACC: 4-7 Big XII: 1-4 Bowl games are not perfect match-ups but they are generally fairly even. And again, the Pac-12 wins by a wide margin. Combining the two, they are 14-4 (77%). No other conference is above .500. I was not aware of how well the Pac 12 was doing in the bowls. I think the Pac 12's record in the bowls, along with a berth in the playoffs, is a pretty compelling argument for them being the best conference. Some, not me, might argue that lower number of teams in the bowls means subtracts from that. I guess arguments could also be made about the quality of the bowl games, though. For example, Alabama lost their bowl, but I think making it to the playoffs and losing in the first round is better than having a team make a low tier bowl and winning. Perhaps others disagree though.

I think Riley improves Nebraska. Michigan already had good recruiting classes under Hoke, so I don't see why there would suddenly be a dearth of good recruits. Plus, in some ways, Oregon State under Riley was better than Nebraska under Pelini. Riley managed to beat some very good teams they were not expected to, which Pelini, did not do for the most part. So even if he puts up the same records as Pelini, they would likely be performances that the NE fan base would be more proud of. If he puts up inconsistent records where the highs are higher (12-2, 13-1), but the lows are lower (7-6, 8-5), I think this would be still be an improvement. Of course, he could have worse records each season, but he seemed to do well with limited resources, so I think NE fans should be hopeful that he'll do better with more resources.

I've never said that; in fact, I've posted probably 10 times in this thread that they're the best conference but that it's not by a big margin. (The margin over the B1G is pretty sizeable though.) But thanks for playing. I think it is arguable who is the best conference this year. Over the past several years, I would agree, though, based on national championships, if nothing else(and there are plenty of other arguments that could be made for them being the best conference besides that). Are you saying that, even over just this year, the margin over the big ten is pretty sizable? If so, what leads you to believe this?

This is not how you should be calculating the average point difference per game. You're letting negative and positives differentials offset each other. You should be using the absolute value of the differentials. For those ten games you get a sum of 144. So the average point difference was 14.4 points. This is only the average point differential and doesn't indicate who it was in favor of. But it does indicate the Vegas's spread was, on average, off by about 2 touchdowns. Which, in my opinion, seems pretty significant. If that was my goal, that's what I would have done. But it wasn't. It was to get an idea of how over or under-rated (or over- or under-performing in the bowl games, as a whole) the SEC was. Yes, Vegas spreads are always off because of variance, that's how it works. My goal was to see if they were consistently off by a meaningful margin in one particular direction. I just noticed you had 9 games and not 10, so the average was really 16. This indicates the magnitude of how far the vegas spread was off on average. I don't believe you have achieved what you wanted with your calculations. A weighted average may be appropriate here to minimize the effect of outlier games. You have 5 positive differentials with a sum of 248 and 4 negative ones with a sum of -82. So 5/9 * 248 + 4/9 * -82 = (1240 -328) / 9 = 101.33 for the weighted point differential sum. The average would then be about 11.259. Edited for clarity (misstated intent of weighted average initially) Ugh. Have too much crap in my text editor scrap page. So 5/9 * 62 + 4/9 * -82 = (310 - 328) /9 = -18/9. So actually, an average of -2. So, yes, your calculation is close anyway in this scenario. So, in terms of just over or under predicting, Vegas seems pretty fair. However, in terms of how accurate they were, they seem pretty off. On the one hand, I guess you could say that SEC represented themselves, fairly well, with respect to the spread. However, the spread had pretty low predictive power (seen by looking at the average magnitude of the differentials) so unless you were interested in just betting, and then only on the whole range of games, I don't think it was too indicative of the SEC's strength. Edit: fixed minor typo Edit 2: fixed redundancies in sentence

This is not how you should be calculating the average point difference per game. You're letting negative and positives differentials offset each other. You should be using the absolute value of the differentials. For those ten games you get a sum of 144. So the average point difference was 14.4 points. This is only the average point differential and doesn't indicate who it was in favor of. But it does indicate the Vegas's spread was, on average, off by about 2 touchdowns. Which, in my opinion, seems pretty significant. If that was my goal, that's what I would have done. But it wasn't. It was to get an idea of how over or under-rated (or over- or under-performing in the bowl games, as a whole) the SEC was. Yes, Vegas spreads are always off because of variance, that's how it works. My goal was to see if they were consistently off by a meaningful margin in one particular direction. I just noticed you had 9 games and not 10, so the average was really 16. This indicates the magnitude of how far the vegas spread was off on average. I don't believe you have achieved what you wanted with your calculations. A weighted average may be appropriate here to minimize the effect of outlier games. You have 5 positive differentials with a sum of 248 and 4 negative ones with a sum of -82. So 5/9 * 248 + 4/9 * -82 = (1240 -328) / 9 = 101.33 for the weighted point differential sum. The average would then be about 11.259. Edited for clarity (misstated intent of weighted average initially)

This is not how you should be calculating the average point difference per game. You're letting negative and positives differentials offset each other. You should be using the absolute value of the differentials. For those ten games you get a sum of 144. So the average point difference was 14.4 points. This is only the average point differential and doesn't indicate who it was in favor of. But it does indicate the Vegas's spread was, on average, off by about 2 touchdowns. Which, in my opinion, seems pretty significant.