tschu

You can make the case that the Big Ten actually has two of the top 5 teams in the country, although with Michigan State it gets a little dicey and they might fall better at 6 or 7. With Sparty, their two losses, admittedly by sizeable margins, are to the two championship game contestants. However until today, their best win was at home by 5 against...Nebraska (though, they should have won by much more). Other than that almost nothing noteworthy on their whole schedule. A win against Baylor is big though.

Then there's a big drop-off to Wisconsin at that ~15thish area, and another drop-off to Nebraska at that ~25thish area, Minnesota somewhere around 30th, and pretty garbage after that

Damn I hate Urban Meyer, I just remembered that

Alright, let's revisit. Bama-tOSU isn't over yet, but I think that with 5 data points from the top of the SECW underperforming their expectations in bowls, we can knock the SECW down one notch. We have a solid trend among those teams. Note that TAMU and Arkansas both did well though. Overall, that division is still really good, and basically the top came down, but the bottom rose up. There are still 6 top-20 power teams, at least, in that division, without a doubt. Bama, Ole Miss, MSU, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU in no particular order (LSU probably last out of that group).

The SEC East on the other hand has done well in its bowls. Tennessee still has to play Iowa which should be a completely terrible game...I'm not holding my breath for this result. There was this narrative this season that the SECE was terrible...sure, UK and Vandy are bad, but that division largely was underrated badly. Georgia can easily make a case for being the best or 2nd best team in the SEC.

In terms of ranking the conferences? Won't change much. The Pac will close the gap a little bit, but that's all. Oregon, Stanford, Utah beat their expected spreads, Arizona, ArizonaSt, and USC did not. I haven't done the math but I think that they as a whole will pick up some ratings points, and the SEC will lose a few. It won't be nearly enough though.

Narratives are fun for some people, and I know many who don't like the conference are glad that the 5 SECW teams lost, and that's fine. Hate away, I won't stop you.

One conference that can make a little jump in the metrics would be the B1G... now the thing about the B1G is that the top teams have all done well in bowls, but the bottom teams have been pretty terrible. That's good, perception-wise, for the B1G since most casual fans don't care that Illinois got romped, they just see that Sparty and Wisconsin won. But top to bottom conference rankings don't care - each team is equal. Still, it's been a good bowl season for the Big Ten who was favored in 0 bowl games and could be sitting at 5-4. (Note that despite being 0 for 10 in being favored, probability dictates that the Big Ten would still go 3-7 or so, on average). Still, a good showing for the Big Ten.

Things look good for the Big Ten. In the next couple of years, I'm thinking that the Big Ten will be right there with the Big 12 for the 3rd best conference due to the Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh hires, Penn State getting back to full strength, etc etc.

Horrible, awful, no-good, very bad throw

Oh dear god

22-yard punt

But really, just watch tOSU's D-Line. They're scary

Bama got issues man, big issues. Well mainly it's two issues - their OL is getting beat - Sims can't find cooper and Yelden can't get established. Also Cardale keeps beating their corners when they're out on islands. Either their scheme isn't effective, or the corners are flat getting beat.

BIG TEN FOOTBALL

How will espn spin this if the West goes 2-5? Beat up from conference play.

There are basically zero good spins for the way the top 5 teams played

lolabama.

This is fun. When do we get to go to 8 teams?

Hooooooooly smokes @ that catch

 

So this whole playoff thing was a terrible idea, right?

 

I mean, this season would have been much better with Alabama and Florida State playing for the National Championship and Oregon not getting a chance.

No. Alabama, Oregon and tOSU deserved to be in the playoffs. But FSU had no business being there no matter what their "record" showed or the fact they're the defending National Champions. If the committee would have taken a hard look at their games, they may have chosen a different 4th team (TCU).

 

I just hate it that this playoff system has ruined the entire bowl season. This hasn't been exciting at all.

Pretty sure you guys's sarcasm meter is broken

So this whole playoff thing was a terrible idea, right?

 

I mean, this season would have been much better with Alabama and Florida State playing for the National Championship and Oregon not getting a chance.

:

Buckeyes need to get in the end zone

So which is it then? You say that Vegas, which is the collection of all public knowledge about all of the football teams condensed into betting spreads, knows what it's doing, and it looks like they have the conference as a whole rated properly...yet we also have this idea that the SEC is overrated? So you need to make the distinction...the SEC is overrated by who?

It appears that they're properly rated, as I've been saying all along, as the #1 conference with the Pac-12 a close second. If we're talking about media bias, I've always agreed that the media gives the SEC more attention than necessary, although that's due to the feverish interest down there and contracts and whatnot. I'm not concerned with any of that.

Go Buckeyes?

Scott Frost is calling an incredible game

Jameis Winston is a bad human being, but he's gonna be a good NFL quarterback

 

 

 

 

 

SEC East outperforming, SEC West underperforming in bowls so far.

It's because they don't care, right? You think that these rankings get inflated/deflated based on the fact that apparently good teams play apparently good teams and apparently bad teams play apparently bad teams?

I mean when an SECW team plays and SECW team, both teams rankings don't go up. One goes up and the others' goes down based on the outcome, proportional to the margin of victory and the difference in their rating. It's not like Bama plays LSU and suddenly both teams make a jump. The reason that the SECW was rated so highly at the beginning of the season was because they were something like 29-0 against all non-SECW teams.

 

As far as the "not caring" narrative...who knows. I hate narratives. For some reason people always try to read into the motivation of each team in a bowl game - maybe motivation is a factor, maybe it isn't; there's no way to know and guessing from the outside is purely conjecture.

Dude, you do science. I play/coach sports. These are people, not chess pieces, not chemical reactions. YOU CANNOT USE SCIENCE WHEN DEALING WITH PEOPLE. It is about narratives because of the fact we are human beings and are driven by our emotion. We don't do the same thing over and over when pressure is applied, this is why science doesn't work here man.

 

Success in sports is entirely about three things: individual player talent, player motivation, and ability of coaches. As already stated, you can't measure motivation. Your fancy little computer programs do not measure coaching prowess, you see Paul Johnson watched film and KNEW that Miss St couldn't stop the dive. Wisconsin watched film and KNEW that Auburn couldn't stop the run. Michigan State watched the film and KNEW that Baylor couldn't run the ball against them.

 

Those teams all out-coached the others. For all this talk about how great Dan Mullen, Hugh Frees (sp?), Gus Malzahn and Art Briles are they were out-coached this week.

HAHAHAHAHA

You don't even know what you're arguing.

Listening to the Auburn post game radio interview. The announcer said the SEC losses are due to "SEC fatigue." So there it is. That explains it.

lol. I mean these teams have had a month off. Fatigue of any sort is no issue.

I TAKE THAT BACK

TOUCHDOWN

Connor Cook has played awful today compared to what he's capable of

Come on Sparty

Depends on what rankings you're talking about, the difference in the rating (not ranking) of the two teams, the HFA, and the margin of victory. If you're talking about human polls, then yeah those are stupid. But we got dominated by Wisconsin and IIRC we only dropped 3 spots in Sagarin.