Thanks for all that, That Don Guy. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if we have to revisit your post at the end of the season, as it’s apt to be a classic example of Murphy’s Law when it’s all said and done.
My Nebraska Cornhuskers should have an interesting season.
I recall in the late 80s and early 90s, we’d get stomped by Miami and Florida State. The games were usually in the Orange Bowl in Florida. So our excuse was “Get these teams to Lincoln and see how their fancy passing works in a Nebraska winter.” Well, we finally get to play Miami in Lincoln this year. In September, when it’s usually in the high 90s. Couldn’t we have shifted the schedule around a bit to bring the Hurricanes in November?
Maryland and Rutgers are in the Big Ten. When Nebraska joined the Big Ten, I felt we had a historical and cultural connection. The two new schools feel like a marketing grab for DC and NYC. Why am I so bitter? They caused a conference re-alignment that took Michigan-Ohio State-Penn State off our schedule!
Six straight four-loss seasons. I would like to call this Pelini’s lame-duck season. But it is impossible fire a 9-win coach and hope to find a replacement.
On the bright side, we have a Heisman candidate running back in Ameer Abdullah. Despite Nebraska’s history, it’s been nearly 2 decades since I could utter that.
Maybe the title is getting old, because it’s counting down from27 days now!
Do your local TV listings show channels for your must-watch games picks yet?
When does the first AP Poll come out? Will your team be in the Top 25?
Has The Nip been called in your area yet?
Have you dusted off your pom-poms yet?
Now that
College Football Ranking Composite
and
Preseason Rankings Comparison
both include the Coaches Poll in their surveys, perhaps we can decide which of their top X-number could make up our SDMB Preseason Top 32?
Ideas? Votes?
It’s 13 days now!
Surely there’s something to say by now?
==========================================
Who takes The College Football Belt away from Oklahoma? - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board
Who takes The College Football Belt away from Oklahoma?
Have you seen an update or a prediction for how the AP preseason looks?
http://www.ncaa.com/rankings/football/fbs/associated-press
It’s not our fault the Big 12 went crazy and decided to take the rest of the country with them. Once Pitt and Cuse left there was really no reason for any of us to stick around if we had better offers. I loved the old look Big East. Mostly for basketball reasons but I also enjoyed watching Rutgers football games where I actually cared about beating the other team beyond getting a W. Now, I look at the Scarlet Knights schedule for 2014 and its hard to get worked up about anything except for Penn-State and Navy. No history with Penn-State though, that’s just a Jersey-PA thing. Since the B1G loves trophies, we will apparently begin a tradition against Maryland. That is kind of cool since we are both newbies to the league but it’s hard to get too excited about fighting for Delaware.
It should be an interesting season all the way around. Rutgers will be in for a rough 2-3 seasons but I don’t expect us to be shut out cellar dwellers the way everyone else does.
If Illinois had been put in the East division, they could have had Maryland fight it out with Illinois and Ohio State for the Illibuck (Terrillibuck?) in a little round-robin every season. That would have been…something.
Speaking of the B1G… Nebraska made the correct decision making the jump, but do you think they anticipated having such a horrible schedule with regards to matchups. The division they’re in other than Wisconsin is extremely weak, and worse yet unexciting matchups.
No discussion of the new “Power 5” rules? As a fan of a team in a mid-major (and a major until recently), I am really worried that we are basically going to have a new division. I don’t see how the other conferences (even the American) are going to compete on more than a fluke basis.
I tend too agree with your assessment, but after seeing the Big East make so many undeserving trips to a BCS Bowl I don’t see this as a bad thing.
And now Notre Dame has removed 4 players from the team for academic fraud. Their top CB and WR are in the mix. How’s that Top 20 ranking looking now?
Good for Notre Dame. It’s nice to see a program that takes athletes’ academics seriously.
I know what you mean, but my team only just signed up (UCF), and we were deserving as hell last year (suck it, Baylor!)
Not according to those who create the polls, who have them in front of both the ACC and Big 10. The average rank of all teams, by conference, using the College Football Ranking Composite is below:
SEC 32.14
P12 36.33
B12 43.70
ACC 48.50
B10 49.86
FBSI 56.00
AAC 78.27
MWC 80.75
MAC 90.92
CUSA 91.92
SBC 102.18
No you’re right UCF deserved to there last year.
And I look forward to seeing Mizzou beat the shit or them here in about a month too.
I forgot you attended school there. We visited a couple years ago to go the game against Mizzou (my sister-in-law attends UCF), I should have mentioned something and tried to tailgate together.
That’s a composite*. The question I was answering was about the Top 4 and in both this year’s preseason poll and last year’s final poll, all 4 of the other conferences had teams above the highest ranked Big12 school.
- I should clarify. I mean it’s a composite of the entire conference. Obviously it’s a composite of all the polls.
Did Oklahoma switch conferences without anyone knowing about it? They appear to average third or so in the preseason polling, which is ahead of everyone but Florida State and Alabama.
So the composite of the conference is third in the preseason and the average of the polls has a Big 12 team ranked third. Sure sounds like top 4 to me. The only major source that has them lower than fourth is the USA today poll. Sporting News actually has them as first.
Just for fun, I took the median of the composite polls used for the earlier calcs.
ACC: 42.5
Big 10: 50.5
Big 12: 33
Pac 12: 24.5
SEC: 18
It seems that the Big 12 falls smack dab in the middle of the 5 conferences using a wide variety of metrics. Not that preseason polls mean anything, but since that’s what we’re discussing, I figured we might as well have the facts.
I was using the composite link provided earlier, which has Oklahoma in 8th just behind Michigan State. Top 10 is:
FSU
Alabama
Oregon
Auburn
Stanford
South Carolina
Michigan State
Oklahoma
Ohio State
UCLA
After looking at that, it seems to be a pretty weird list. As far as I can tell, all but one of the rankings it includes are algorithm based, which doesn’t really work with zero games played. I was using sources such as Athlon, Sporting News, USA Today, Phil Steele, etc, which use human prognosticators. I actually trust a composite of computers over a composite of humans, but not until the sample sizes exceed zero by quite a bit.
Preseason AP poll is up.
- FSU
- Bama
- Oregon
- Oklahoma
- Ohio St
- Auburn
- UCLA
- Michigan St
- South Carolina
- Baylor