I get to keep it short this week: I agree with all of the above! Thanks, Omar!.
After a satisfying romp over the Beavis last weekend, bringing home the Platypus Trophy for the 7th straight year, Oregon moves on to face Arizona, which has a two-game winning streak against us. Hopefully it will be our turn to win one, and then on to glory. Interestingly,Nate Silverthinks the Ducks have a 30% chance of finishing in the top 4 even with a loss to Arizona, which I think would be wrong (although I’d take it!). Now that all five major conferences are guaranteed to produce a champion with no more than 2 losses, I would think non-champions shouldn’t have any business being in the discussion at all. Of course, what we have no way of knowing is how much extra credit the committee will give teams for winning their championships.
Sagarin ratings lose credibility with me when it has a 6-6 Arkansas team ranked ahead of a 12-0 Florida State team.
From what I understand about Sagarin’s modeling that it puts too much emphasis on who opponents play, and opponents opponents play and opponents opponents opponents play rather than WINS and LOSSES.
Look at Sagarin’s Strength of Schedule (ranking)
Auburn
Arkansas
LSU
Alabama
TAMU
Ole Miss
Tennessee
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
South Carolina
Vandy
Miss State
Missouri
Its self perpetuating math. I wonder how many circulars references Sagarin’s formulas have to ignore in order to get the snowball effect to calculate
Bama gets credit because Ole Miss and Miss St and Auburn etc have Bama on their schedule.
Just popping in to say Bill Blankenship has been fired as head coach of the University of Tulsa. He had many fine qualities but the most important one (winning) was lacking.
TU used to be a perennial contender in their previous conference but not so much since moving to the former Big East conference, renamed to American Athletic conference. TU plays many of the schools that it has played throughout the years in various conferences. It is also the smallest school in the FBS.
You just highlighted two of the reasons right after the question. Neither Florida or Notre Dame is anything like a playoff contender this year. Notre Dame is 1-4 after the close loss to FSU including their last loss where they got absolutely pile driven by a middle of the PAC12 unranked USC team. Florida performed so well their coach got fired midseason. Florida State beat them both in close games (even with home field advantage) and managed to look unimpressive in the process.
In the last three games (two at home) they’ve managed to win by an average margin of 3.3 pts against unranked teams that have a combined record of 19-16. If you didn’t know they were undefeated would that sound like the number one team in the country? Would that even sound like a playoff contender? The committee looks at those things.
Yeah, I see Sagarin has Alabama and both Mississippis in his top 4, and has Oregon at #5, clearly demonstrating that he has no idea what he’s talking about! Anyone know of any data showing how well these ratings have done in the past at predicting future outcomes?
Re: FSU’s strength of schedule, I give them credit for trying to play a tough schedule; these games are scheduled several years in advance and I’m sure they thought Florida, Stanford and Notre Dame were going to be potentially impressive OOC wins. It just didn’t work out for them, and that’s certainly not their fault. But they need to be judged based on the schedule they actually played, not the one they had hoped to play.
notfrommensa is saying the same thing, but why does Alabama have so many Top 25 wins? Alabama has 3 based on Sunday’s AP, but 2 of those are the only 4-loss teams (other than Utah) teams in the T25. Why are they there? Because they played Alabama and each other. You have to assume the SEC is the best conference in the country for this to work, but once you make that assumption everything else works out.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
We are the defending National Champions with an undefeated follow-up season and a 28 game win streak. We are number one until somebody beats us. You want FSU out? It’s easy. Win. Until then, deal with it. It’s your problem, not ours. The vaunted SEC has had their shots at us over the past two seasons. They fucking lost.
Those conference rankings are a joke. Take the Big Ten for example. Nobody believes the Wst is Better than the East. Both Ohio State and Michigan State are better than Wisconsin, but because they have Penn State and Rutgers and Indiana, they are dragged down. The West has one good team, a bunch of mediocre teams, but only one who is complete dogshit (Purdue.) They should just count the three best teams in the conference and rank them that way.
Who cares how bad Vanderbilt or Colorado or Wake Forest are?
Florida State has played 11 (of 12) games against Power 5 Conferences & Notre Dame. If another school has done that this season, please let them raise their hands.
FSU’s record is getting (partly) criticized because the perception that the ACC is weak. And IMO, that perception did not change much (if any) after the ACC beat the SEC in the 4 in-state rivalry game.
If Ga Tech beats FSU and tOSU beats Wisconsin, there is going to be a lot of lobbying for tOSU to leap frog into the playoffs (over FSU). And I think that BullS***. The B1G is not as good as the ACC. As far as I can tell, the B1G had one OoC win against a top 25 team. Indiana over Mizzou. I know the ACC has at least two. Va Tech over tOSU and GT over UGA. And at the time FSU beat Notre Dame, ND was undefeated with two of their wins over B1G teams.
Wondering about this “predictive power of ratings” thing, I just checked the data for the five weeks since the committee has been releasing their rankings. CFB-ranked teams are 54-10 against unranked teams. In games between ranked teams, the higher-ranked team is 16-8 (all rankings as of the time the game was played). That seems fairly impressive, but there’s nothing to compare it to, at least not that I can figure out quickly and easily.
Oh right, Notre Dame played Stanford, I guess I got confused.
Can’t agree with your last paragraph, though; if tOSU wins and FSU loses, the choice will be between a one-loss Big 10 champion and a one-loss ACC not-champion. In that scenario, I would certainly take tOSU, and if they also lose, I would take either Wisconsin or Georgia Tech over FSU.
If the committee don’t take championships into account, I agree that it would be debatable whose body of work was more impressive, but they are supposed to give conference champions the benefit of any doubt, and I personally believe that they should do so.
That’s only slightly more relevant than a Michigan fan bringing up having more programs wins in their history than any other teams. It’s completely irrelevant in my mind for ranking in the current season no matter who makes the case.
Current undefeated season does matter and earns them a playoff spot if they continue. That it continues a historical streak is interesting but irrelevant in my mind. Would you say Florida State wouldn’t have earned a spot this season by going undefeated if they were 2-10 last year. No matter what happened last season I consider it worthless in considering performance this season.
Someone has to win the B1G and it is either going to be tOSU or Wisconsin.
Someone has to be the best surfer in South Dakota. It doesn’t mean that they are competitive against the best surfers in Hawaii.
OK, the analogy is hyperbolic, but just a little. Someone had to emerge from the B1G but it doesn’t tell me that the B1G is any good. Everyone says the conference games are forced losses, but that means that they are forced wins too. The B1G had only one OoC win against a Top 25 team (Indiana over Mizzou) and the next best win was probably Nebraska over Miami.
As a Husker fan, I wanted Bo gone for a while. Strangely, my knee-jerk reaction on Sunday morning was “How dare Nebraska fire a 9-win coach, Nebraska’s going to regret this”
Then I remember my knee-jerk reactions after these games against ranked teams:
2011: Wisconsin 48-17 “Fire Bo”
2011: Michigan 45-17 “Fire Bo”
But we finish with 9 wins, maybe things aren’t so bad. Wait until next year.
2012: Ohio State 63-38 “Fire Bo”
2012: Wisconsin 70-31 “Fire Bo”
But we finish with 9 wins, maybe things aren’t so bad. Wait until next year.
2013: UCLA 41-21 “Fire Bo”
2013: Iowa 38-17 “Fire Bo”
But we finish with 9 wins, maybe things aren’t so bad. Wait until next year.
2014: Wisconsin 59-24 “Only now do I see a pattern?”
Everyone points to the 9 wins and it seemed to have made him invincible. “If Nebraska fires another 9-win coach, they’ll never get anyone to coach here”. Even Tom Osborne lost the big one for years before he won conference and national titles. But did we really have to lose every TV game against mid-ranked opponents so badly? I mean, in 2012, we got drilled by unranked Wisconsin in the Big Ten title game, and 2 years later Wisconsin does the SAME thing again.
After that game, I do believe most fans outside Nebraska had sympathy for us if we decided it wasn’t working, despite the 9 wins.
Last year, he practically dared the AD Eichorst to fire him after his 4th loss. The AD blinked, and Bo probably felt he still had the power over a 2nd-year AD. My guess is he was asked to change his coordinators, and he probably said “FU, this is my staff and my process. The players just aren’t executing. If you don’t like it, find someone else”.
I am hoping that Eichorst already has someone lined up when he fired Pelini.
In an ideal world, you’re right - it shouldn’t. Problem is “The Committee” (and the polls) do take that stuff into account or the SEC wouldn’t get a strength of schedule boost since much of the SEC’s early rankings come based on the historical strength of the conference’s teams.
If we’re not the defending National Champs, then the SEC is just another conference. And based on their head-to-head against the ACC this year no better and arguably worse (ACC v P5 OOC is 10-7, the vaunted SEC is 5-6).
I’m not arguing that the B1G is better than the ACC, I’m arguing that winning championships is better than not winning championships! If I understand this correctly, you are arguing that an 11-1 FSU team which didn’t win its conference would still deserve to go to the playoff over an 11-1 tOSU team which did? And this is because the ACC had two good OOC wins and the B1G had only one? You’re going to need more than three games worth of data to convince me that the difference between these conferences is all that vast.
Besides, if FSU loses to Georgia Tech, GT will have only one more loss, the head-to-head win, and the conference championship – it seems to me that if any ACC team makes the playoff in that scenario, it should be GT and not FSU. Would you disagree with that?
I’m a 'Noles fan, and no, I wouldn’t disagree at all; in fact, it’s the indisputable way that things should go, IMO.
I doubt Zak will disagree, either, since it fulfills the one requirement he has laid down in order for him to consider that FSU has lost it’s hold on the title: beat us.