BeltwayHusker

Uh...Nas? Jay-Z now hates you, GMoose. As does Billy Joel, probably, since he has the only song I know of called "New York State of Mind." Jay-Z's is "Empire State of Mind." Well, we can't all be musical connoisseur's can we? Ha, I kid, of course. I don't know how I feel that I'm in my 30's and still try to keep my rappers straight.

Uh...Nas? Jay-Z now hates you, GMoose. As does Billy Joel, probably, since he has the only song I know of called "New York State of Mind." Jay-Z's is "Empire State of Mind."

I'll be in the stadium cheering on the Hokies on Monday night! So happy to have a big-time college football game in the DC area for once. Good luck to the Hokies this year.

This article, from December 1971, was posted on Deadspin today. A truly great read for many reasons. A snippet: Great stuff throughout the article.

Yikes! The only teams we don't play in both 2011 and 2012 are Illinois, Indiana, and Purdue. All five of the big dogs (Mich, OSU, Iowa, PSU, Wisconsin) both years. Welcome to the Big 10, I guess?!? On the bright side, we'll swap out OSU and Wisconsin for two of those three (Ill, Ind, or Purdue) in 2013.

Does anyone think it's possible that Nebraska won't have a "protected" cross-division rival? It's already been reported by ESPN that Michigan-OSU will be "protected" rivals, of course, and also Minnesota-Wisconsin and Illinois-Northwestern. If we were to have a protected rival not including the above teams, it would presumably be Penn State. But then you have to do something with Iowa and Michigan State in one division and Indiana and Purdue in the other. "Protecting" any of those matchups makes no sense, other than just to even out the schedule. Why couldn't they protect only the three floated above, and let the rest of our schedules float freely with the out of division games? We'd play at least one of OSU and PSU every year, and we'd rotate through the opposite division teams more quickly. With annual games against Michigan and Iowa, we'd have enough annual rivalry games. It's completely feasible to do this within either a 8-game or 9-game schedule. I have no idea whether they'd consider it or not.

Why do you say that? I really hope it is, the MSU-PSU rivalry is forced. For the same reason they'll likely move the OSU-Michigan game earlier in the season. They wouldn't want to run the risk of us playing PSU over Thanksgiving and again the next week in the championship game. Our final regular season opponent will be a division foe. Probably Iowa, but if the Big 10's really chasing national attention at the end of the season, maybe Nebraska-Michigan? If they were to put Nebraska vs. Michigan in an annual end-of-year slot, you have to think that would at least "cloud" the primacy of the OSU-Michigan rivalry in the longterm. Think of wee little Michigan fans who are very young today. By the time they're in their 20's, will they care more about all the cross-divisional mid-season games against their "traditional" rival? Or will they care more about a string of season-ending games against Nebraska, often with the division crown at stake? Fun for us as Nebraska fans, but I really think the big 10 is making a dumb move by splitting OSU and Michigan and would make it worse by putting Nebraska-Michigan at the end of the season. MU-MSU and Nebraska-Iowa to end the year makes more sense.

Live special tomorrow at 7pm eastern on the B10 network. Supposedly announcing divisions (so goes the rumor). See here: Message Board Rumor Fun!

Also, he's #13 overall on the Rivals JUCO Top 50. Dexter Moody also on there at #47. Some of you who follow recruiting closer than me may recognize a few more names. Link

I'm sorry to be contributing to the hijacking of this thread, but the above message contains a great deal of misinformation about how copyright law works. First, just because something is put up on a blog with no ads does not mean that it is exempt from copyright law. Someone publishing a free blog still maintains rights to control the distribution and use of the material posted there. They can choose to say, "Feel free to republish elsewhere" or "You may republish for a fee" or whatever. Second, the reprinting of a paragraph of a copyrighted work is permissible under the principle of fair use (unless you're not using it for "fair use" purposes, which do include commentary and discussion). This is true even in the case of paid sites like Rivals. If you reprint a paragraph of "subscriber-only" info on Rivals for the purposes of commentary and discussion, you may be violating the terms of your subscription agreement with Rivals, but you're not violating any copyright laws. (The limits on how much of the article you can reprint is a bit more legally complicated). Also, you'd be violating Huskerboard.com rules, which is of course the prerogative of the fine folks running this site. It is certainly likely that this particular blog writer doesn't care about the material being reprinted in its entirety, but that's his option as controller of the copyright. Again, sorry to hijack, but I couldn't resist clarifying, especially given the "How about you actually look into something before you start going off on them?" comment. If any intellectual property experts want to correct me, go for it. I've only done a little bit of copyright work, but enough to feel pretty confident of the info above.

Hey thanks for your input saunders45. Next time I'll post a paragraph and link it since you're intimidated by long articles. I'll see if I can find some pictures to go with it too just to make it easy on you. I'll ignore the childish insult (hurrrrr durrrr, yurrrr dumbbbb), and spell it out for you. It's not about the article "length" at all. But copy/pasting a whole article removes the need to visit the site, denying them of page hits and ad revenue. But from a convenience standpoint, I would personally much rather have the entire article posted than only a paragraph and then a link. It is, however, a copyright violation to post the whole article. Not that anyone would likely ever get in trouble over this one... Nevertheless, I vote for letting the people who did the work to write the article get the page hit. Plus, when they get big page hit numbers for Nebraska articles, all the more reason for them to cover the Huskers more... /End hijack

It's actually Ohio State - Wisconsin. And yes, it's (apparently) locked in as the ABC night game for 10/16. That doesn't mean Gameday won't come to Lincoln (in fact, I'm sure they will, unless Nebraska and Texas lose some games before then). But it does make it almost certain that Nebraska-Texas will be an afternoon game, since ABC/ESPN will want to spread out the "big" games of the day.

So, I tried to sign up, only to discover that there's no way to select "District of Columbia" or anything similar in the drop-down menu. What's up with that!? Sheesh, I know everyone's fed up with "Washington", but some of us just live here!

SmartFootball.com has an interesting post today addressing the Staples/Mandel article discussed in another thread, and contemplating future strategic trends in college football. Lots of good stuff here, but just a taste: I have a memory of one of the early 90's games against Washington where our offense was basically shut down by their eight-man front. I was a youngster then, so someone can correct me if I'm remembering incorrectly. He discusses how the future trends will likely start on the defensive side. The Pelini brothers' success in limiting spread teams is not mentioned, but is very much on point to this article. Maybe in 10 years writers will discuss how defenses like the "Peso" led to significant new trends in offensive strategy.... Here's the link.

In general, I agree with this. But there's one angle that complicates it for me: I really think this team needs to beat at least one "elite" team this year to take the next step. It's been too long (OU in 2001) since we've done so. As it is now, Texas happens to be the only elite team on our schedule. Of course, there's always the possibility of the big 12 championship game and a bowl opponent. But for now, Texas is the only big dog on our schedule. An 11-3 or even 12-2 season with no win over a top 15 opponent would be an awesome season, but it would still feel to me like we hadn't quite gotten out of the rut of the past 9 years. Note: By "elite", I just mean something like: ranked at least top 15, preferably top 10, at the time we play them. So, it's not about Texas for me so much as it is about our one clear chance for an elite win. And sure, it's a little bit about Texas, too. Now if only I hadn't been stupid enough to plan a wedding for Oct. 9th and thus a honeymoon during the Texas game. Any Husker Bars in Ecuador?

Part III (60-41) is out.... and guess which Nebraska team is listed at #47? (Hint: If this list were on ESPN, everyone here would go ballistic.) http://footballoutsiders.com/varsity-numbers/2010/top-100-college-football-teams-last-100-years-part-iii Keep in mind that this is a purely formula-based, mathematical calculation. Nobody on FootballOutsiders.com did this because they hate Nebraska. In fact, there's no subjective assessment on the back end at all. They just created a formula that they argue is fairly good at evaluating teams, and then this list is what the formula spat out. I also encourage you to read their explanation before totally dismissing - they acknowledge that if they had access to all the play-by-play data, they would be able to discount yardage gained against our scrubs in garbage time, and they said that "may well shoot this team to the top of the list." Beyond that, this is still a very interesting list, and a fun read.

The excellent site FootballOutsiders.com is running a list of the top 100 college football teams of all time, based on a statistical analysis of offensive and defensive efficiency. For the stats nerds out there, the methodology of their measures (S&P+ & FEI) are also well worth reading. So far, they've only posted teams 100-81, and 1972 Nebraska checks in, somewhat surprisingly, at #90: The whole list is worth checking out. Link: http://footballoutsiders.com/varsity-numbers/2010/vn-greatest-teams-last-100-years-no-100-81

True that the values are weak, but I actually don't think it's due to the sample size. The problem is I only used one variable, omitting many others (coaching continuity, spending, recruiting, conference strength, etc.) Past success does correlate with future success in football, but alone, it'll never match up to an extremely high degree, no matter how big the sample. There are just too many other variables at play. Since that's true, it's not surprising the R^2 with only the one variable (past success) is in the 25% range. If the other factors were easier to quantify, you could certainly build a more complicated model and isolate the impacts of the different factors...

For 10 years (1990-1999 vs. 2000-2009), it's 0.236. For 25 years (1975-1999 vs. 2000-2009), its 0.272. Weak effects, and arguably a wash between the two. But enough to say that a) there is some correlation between past and future success in general and b)25-year success is at least as good, if not better, than "recent" success. But now we're getting super nerdy.

Since I didn't actually try to build a predictive model, there's not really an error to test. All I did was determine whether 10-year or 25-year past history correlated better with success in the next 10 years, using the year 2000 as a reference point. As it turned out, the 25-year data had a better correlation. Certainly, the deviations were still pretty big; on average, winning percentage was plus or minus 0.108 between the 25-year result and the result in the future 10 years (e.g., from 0.600 to 0.708 or to 0.492). The average deviation in winning percentage rank among 100 teams was about 22 (e.g., from 40th best up to 18th best or down to 62nd best). These are big swings, proving that this should not be used to predict the success of a given team. I'm sure recruiting rankings would help predict success over the next few years to some extent, but I'm not sure how well they'd work for a 10-year future time frame. I also imagine that some sort of weighting system, whereby more remote years are weighted less heavily than recent years, could work better. But that seems like a lot of work for a model with pretty limited use... all I wanted to test was whether Iowa and Wisconsin's recent successes mean they should be treated as superior to Michigan and Penn State when trying to create competitively balanced divisions in the Big 10.

Gee, and here I thought I'd stumbled upon a flawless way to see into the future! Obviously, this (and any similar) approach is pretty useless for actually predicting the success of these teams. But here's all I was trying to say: 1) "Competitive balance" is allegedly being used as a factor in making the divisions for the Big 10. 2) This necessitates determining the likely success of the teams. 3) Past success does have some correlation with future success. (Though this is common sense, math can, in fact, prove it.) 4) Various commentators have relied upon a longer time horizon (Mich, OSU, PSU, and Neb as the best teams) or a shorter time horizon (adding Iowa and Wisconsin, and diminishing Michigan, PSU) to determine the predicted competitiveness of proposed divisions. 5) I was curious to test the difference between the two approaches, using a recent but testable point in time. It's just food for thought. The original post acknowledges that the deviations are pretty big. If "math can't predict the future", then I guess we're stuck between a)the conventional wisdom and unsupported opinions of columnists and AD's and b)abandoning any attempt to seek "competitive balance." Granted, when Delaney says "competitve balance", he probably just means "most profitable alignment." In which case, nevermind I guess!

Beware, this is a pretty nerdy post. In the process of creating Big 10 divisions with "Competitive Balance", there has been some debate over whether Michigan and Penn State should be considered as competitively elite, due to their long histories of success, or whether the relative strength of Iowa and Wisconsin in recent years should be more heavily weighted. This question interests me, so I did a little bit of research... Here's the method I used: I took the records of teams from 1990-1999, 1975-1999, and all time through 1999, and compared them to the teams' success in 2000 to 2009. I averaged the absolute deviation between each teams winning percentage across the compared periods. As a separate point of comparison, I ranked the winning percentages for all 100 teams (excluding teams that weren't in I-A long enough) and average the absolute deviations in the rankings. Now, I know there are more defensible ways of doing this, statistically (normalizing the data would be a start, since the set with the longer time-horizon naturally has less variance). If anyone for some reason wants to keep playing with this, the data sheet is linked below. The results? In the year 2000, using 25 years of past history would have predicted success in the next ten years better than using data form only the previous 10 years. Interestingly, using rankings, 25 years was also superior to using all-time records, though this was pretty close. On average, a team's winning percentage in the 2000's varied by 0.108 from their 25-year winning percentage prior to 2000. Their ranking (by winning percentage) in the 2000's varied on average by 21.8 spots (out of 100) from their ranking over 1975-1999. The team with the biggest variance? TCU: 5th best winning percentage in the 2000's, 90th in the 25 years prior. So, this would suggest that it's reasonable (though of course no guarantee) to expect Michigan and Penn State to win more than Iowa and Wisconsin over the next 10 years, despite their better records in the last 10 years. If you want to see the data, here it is: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Avzywsc6VKg9dFRaYS1VR0kzakZVLU1Gb0RWREpFTnc&hl=en&authkey=CPea6uAF On a separate note, why can't we have dynamic redistricting, with rivalries protected, every few years, based on a formula?