Right and which conference has the most impressive cross-conference wins at this point? It ain’t the big 12. I mean Texas got fucking rolled by Arkansas – fucking 3rd or 4th in the SEC West Arkansas. Okay? To be real, I think Arky is actually a top-10 team but the computers that you’re basing your arguments on probably don’t see it that way.
At the end of the season, those same computers end up ranking OU in the top 4 again and again, and what happens? They get fucking murdered. This is why you have to take a step back and say, okay, let’s go beyond the computers here.
Trivia question: Which conference has never, ever won a CFP game? LOL
Oh for fuck’s sake. It started to look like maybe you understood data, but then you pull this shit. Oregon-Ohio State isn’t particularly telling about either the season or the conferences. UCLA-LSU even less so. If you’re using cross-conference wins as your indicator of strength, then Alabama needs a low ranking. Their best cross-conference win was against #58 Miami.
You can’t seem to look past a game or two. The computers can see them all.
They see them at #11. Are you not able to click on links?
At the end of the season, those same computers end up ranking OU in the top 4 again and again, and what happens? They get fucking murdered. This is why you have to take a step back and say, okay, let’s go beyond the computers here.
Last year, they had OU at #11 nearing the end of the season, but after the regular season and conference championships were over, they landed at #7. They went on to beat the shit out of Florida, who had been ranked #12 at the time.
The year before, they had OU at #4, due to the fact that no one else had as few as 1 losses. Georgia was ranked 5th, but didn’t get in the top four due to losing to South Carolina and losing to LSU by a similar margin to what OU ended up losing by. I’d say that was a perfectly valid ranking.
The year before that, the computers put OU at #6, but the humans put them at #4 so they made the playoffs, where they lost to the #1 ranked (by humans and computers) Alabama by 11 points.
I have gut feelings and I have hunches. My job is to ignore all of those and follow the data. While sometimes my hunches and instincts are right, sometimes they’re not. My data doesn’t steer me wrong.
What data we do have suggests that Big12’s elite teams don’t do well in the CFP. Let me know when they win a game in the CFP. I bet it won’t be this year, lol.
Sure, so could Texas, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Kansas State, or West Virginia, all of whom are ranked higher than the third ranked team in the Pac-12.
That’s kind of the point. OU might outrank Oregon in the rankings, but the conference is strong enough that they have all sorts of challengers.
Alabama is consistently in the top 4 year after year largely because they have the pollsters in their back pocket and because they don’t fucking play anybody. I’ll grant that Miami is generally a quality OOC game but the rest is a cupcake feast: Southern Mississippi, Mercer, and New Mexico State and OF COURSE all of their OOC games are at home. All they have to do is win all but one or two of their SEC games and they’re in the playoff. They barely got by Florida and getting by Mississippi (I refuse to call them 'Ole Miss) and A&M will guarantee yet another unearned playoff spot.
I agree. I know this is unpopular but I think the NCAA should schedule non-conference games to even the playing field. (Allow teams an extra game if they want to schedule a small school to help it financially.)
Not this drivel again. I’ll concede that Bama could put another conference opponent on their schedule. Fine, let’s put Vanderbilt or Tennessee or Kentucky on Bama’s schedule. It’s not like the outcome would be much different.
And they don’t play anybody? They play in the SEC West. Three teams from their division have won national championships over the past 10 years. Show me another conference that can make that claim.
These “higher rankings” were influenced mightily by pre-season rankings, which OU regularly benefits from.
Put it this way: OU was put to the test by Tulane. Meanwhile, Ole Miss, a team that has never even been to its own conference championship game, destroyed Tulane by 40 points.
In an ideal world, we’d have conferences agree to a minimum number of games within their own conference, and maybe to balance things out, the major conferences could do something similar to what the NFL does with their scheduling of non-division opponents. Create several scheduling scenarios, and higher-ranked teams from the previous year would be scheduled against a higher-ranked team the following year. Obviously, with the draft, transfers, and loss of assistants, there’s no guarantee that a team that was good in 2021 would be just as good in 2022, but at least the effort is there.
Short of that, expand the playoff field to 8 teams to give other teams a chance at the title. Expanding it much beyond eight teams probably hurts the regular season, though.
Yeah, I think I’ll let him think that he knows what he’s talking about, since it’s pretty obvious to the rest of us that he has no idea. Especially now that I see he’s gone to “transitive property of inequality” land. Hooo boy.
UCLA beat LSU by 11. UCLA beat Stanford by 11. So per the transitive property, LSU and Stanford are equivalent. Of course, Kansas State beat Stanford by 17, so obviously they are better than both LSU and UCLA. I’m starting to understand how his brain works, but it will probably set me back years analytically if I continue down this path, so I’m going to stop.
There are two top-25 matchups this weekend that feature undefeated teams. Baylor travels to Oklahoma State, where the Cowboys are 4.5 point favorites. The winner of this game may have the best option to unseat OU as the B12 champ. (BTW, OU was a bad snap away from losing to West Virginia in Norman last Saturday.)
The most interesting game this weekend is #7 Cincinnati visiting #9 Notre Dame. The undefeated Irish are 2.5 point underdogs at home. That doesn’t happen very often.
My gut says no. I think they’re better, but I don’t know if UGA’s gonna blow them out of their cleats. We’re about to find out just how damn good Georgia’ defense is. It’s touted as one of the best, if not the best, in the country. We’ll see.
If Clemson had turned out to be better, I could have seen it. As it stands, it turns out we don’t know if Arkansas over Texas was awesome or just a shitty Texas, much like we don’t know if Georgia over Clemson has any more meaning than Georgia over South Carolina.
I don’t think we’ll have definitive knowledge about the strengths of the teams in the top 40 or so after this weekend, but we should know a lot more than we do today about where many of them stand in relationship to each other.
