Wednesday, October 30, 2013

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 10

We're starting to come down to the home stretch in the college football season. Most of the have-nots have been weeded out, and early yesterday I came out with new playoff seedings through 9 weeks of games.



So as we start Week 10 today, I should get back to schedule analysis. We don't have many more out of conference games, but for the independents, this is kind of important, and it's also good to document all the late-season cupcake feasting that happens (looking at you, SEC...)
 
So below you can find this week's numbers, as well as how each conference now stacks up to this point in the season. You can find last week's rankings here.


Tuesday, October 29, 2013

2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 9 Seedings

One thing I will credit the current system for: they do do a pretty good job of creating some drama in the college football regular season. I still think more could be created with a playoff, since more games would have implications, but what do I know? I'm not a money-laden, easy-to-be-bought sheep who believes every lie the big conference commissioners spit out for a long time. Hold on, let me get off my soapbox.

A couple of the unbeatens fell from the pedestal this week, leaving us with only 8 teams at that mark through 9 weeks of football. Of these, amazingly only one is guaranteed to fall (and at the latest, that would be during the ACC title game between Florida State and Miami). Could you imagine if we have 7 undefeated teams at the end of the regular season? How much anger would that drum up against not only the current system, but even the "College Football Playoff" that will debut in 2014? If this year were the first year of that and those seven unbeatens held firm, you'd have to snub three teams. Obviously we know Kirk Herbstreit doesn't have a problem pissing off fan bases of schools from mid major conferences, but Fresno State's fan base would be upset too. On a bigger scale, you'd have to keep one of the following teams out: the winner of FSU/Miami, Baylor, Ohio State, Oregon, or Alabama. This is why 4 teams is not enough. Of course, knowing the way college football works, 4 of these teams will probably end up losing and we'd have to discuss the merits of their wins and losses, which is why we need a 16 team field. Give every conference champ a berth, add in at larges to fill the field, and let them play to decide who's the best. Isn't that the way football was meant to be?

But enough of my grandstanding. With Week 9's results taken into account, here's how I would seed the 16 team field if the season ended today. If you want to see last week's setup and a key to the acronyms next to each team, you can view it here.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Game Notes: Minnesota Wild @ Chicago Blackhawks (10/26/13)

Final Score

Game Summary
A bit of an ugly game for the Blackhawks (6-2-3), who came out kind of flat in the early going. The Wild (6-3-3) never trailed, tallying the first goal midway through the opening frame. They scored early in the second to double the lead. A Hawk goal was taken away due to a high stick, but they came down and scored a couple minutes later. The Wild would get it right back and go up 3-1 after two. The Hawks never got closer in the third. Ultimately though, it was not a great night for Corey Crawford, who only stopped 80% of the shots he faced while Niklas Backstrom held off 33 of the 36 shots the Hawks threw at his net.

Three Stars
3. Ryan Suter (MIN). 2 A, 2 SOG, +1. One of Minnesota's high-priced acquisitions of the 2012 offseason notched a helper on Zach Parise's opening goal in the first, which was kind of a soft tally for Crow to let up. His second came in the 2nd period on the #1 star's first goal.
2. Niklas Backstrom (MIN). 33 SV, 3 GA, .917 SV%. Backstrom picked up his first win of the year, and didn't look bad doing so. He made some big stops to help keep the Hawks out of the net.
1. Jason Pominville (MIN), 2 G, 6 SOG, +2. Pominville ultimately had the game-winning goal in the third to, for all intents and purposes, put the game out of reach.

Final Thoughts
Not a great outing for the Hawks, back home off their Florida swing. It also drops my in-person record to 1-1 (the win coming last season against Nashville). It was really nice to get back to the Madhouse though. Jim Cornelison nailed the anthem as always (and I think it seemed louder than the first time, but that could be me). But the atmosphere was, of course, great. I just wish the outcome could have been as well. Going 1-7 on power plays just isn't going to get it done. Kane did have a nice goal on the one, but they just couldn't get enough done on Backstrom. On the other end, the Hawks were only listed as having 4 giveaways, but it sure seemed like more (probably because the giveaways promptly led to Wild goals). As it is though, it's a long season with plenty of games left. You'd like to have something from a game against a division foe, but the Hawks get them up in the Twin Cities on Monday, hopefully with a good chance to get some revenge for tonight's setback.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

COAS/SSLYAR Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 8

Momentum is a fickle thing.

After one week of picking games, Nathaniel actually held a slim lead over me before I bounced back. At this point we've slowed down from our early success and are seeing some lower scoring weeks. Maybe we're thinking wrong about teams after seven weeks, maybe parity actually rules. Probably a little of both.

I saw Nathaniel for the first time in a while last week and the first thing he told me was, "You're kicking my ass in [Pigskin Pick 'Em]." Which is somewhat true; I hold an 8 game lead. But there are 10 weeks left, and plenty of time for me to fall off the table.

In Week 8, we disagree on 5 of the 13 games on the slate. As I was entering these, it seemed like we agreed on more than 8 games, but all the disagreements got clustered together. Might have been part of it. So at least for this week, my lead is safe. But how safe? Let's find out.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

I'm Telling On You For Being Better!

Photographer unknown, from Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Life is often full of grey areas. Sports, to a degree, is an area that goes against this. In competitive leagues, only one thing ultimately matters: when the clock hits zero, which side's number is higher?

Whether I've developed credibility as a writer or not in the couple years since I started COAS or not, I did play competitive sports for a few years when I was younger. Those days are over, but the lessons they taught remain, and always will. And, like almost all athletes, the defeats my teams suffered taught us more than any victories ever did.

Between T-ball, basketball and soccer for the Fox Valley Park District, soccer and basketball for St. Paul's, and basketball for Aurora Christian, I played in a lot of games. My teams won our fair share, but we also lost plenty. And amongst those games were plenty of blowouts. I remember one season in Park District basketball where Nathaniel and I played together on a completely stacked team. We won our first two games by combined scores of 52-6 and 46-0 (how I remember these when I was like 10 at the time, I'll never know). And it's not like we kept the starters in the whole game. We had a 10-kid roster, and our coach rotated between two 5-man lineups over the course of the game. It's not like he was trying to run up the score; our team was just flat out better than everyone else.

I've been on the other side plenty of times too. My freshman year at Aurora Christian, I was one of about 10 or 11 guys. And we got our butts handed to us plenty of times. I remember in our first game we didn't score until midway through the third quarter. It was bad. But the other team didn't taunt us, and they did eventually call off the dogs and bring in the end of the bench. But we learned from it. Eventually, we got better as a team, and while we still weren't that great, we weren't that awful team that needed almost 20 minutes of game time to score.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I heard news coming out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area yesterday... I was offended.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 9

You know we're getting to the good part of football season when we start talking playoffs, and every game really starts to have serious implications. We are that far now, since I have my first Death to the BCS seedings out. And these will probably change a fair amount over the next month or so. Such is the nature of college football.

Now that I'm caught up on my spreadsheet and all my numbers I should be good to go to update the weekly rankings of each conference. If you want to see where everyone ranked through 8 weeks with some tweaks since I had to reenter all the numbers, you can find those rankings here. In the meantime, here's where we stand with the one game that started last night and the several more to be played yet through Saturday.


Monday, October 21, 2013

2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 8 Seedings

I've decided that for this year, this series of information needs its own set of posts.

If you've been reading COAS for most of the season, you've seen me update how well I think teams are scheduling their games. But you may also remember I alluded to a couple other formulas I was going to use. Looking through standings, with a lot of the unbeatens now fallen, I actually have few enough that I should be able to get them all in, and still fulfill the requirements to set up the field of 16 for the Death to the BCS Playoffs! And it's much less complicated then last year! Maybe that has something to do with the fact that this time, I know what I'm doing ahead of time.

So if you've never read Death to the BCS (and really, you should; it exposes all the flaws of the bowl system that we're switching from next season), it proposes a 16 team field made up of the conference champions (though we're down a conference from years past) and at large berths fill the bracket. The idea here is that elitism rampant in the power conferences gets tempered somewhat for the benefit of giving every team a legitimate shot at a championship by deciding it on the field, not in biased polls or algorithms. In an ideal world, I'd have a selection committee do this, but I'll make do with myself and a wealth of information. I also want to take into account a couple of the computer formulas. Jeff Sagarin, who does one of the computer rankings for the BCS, does a more correct version that accounts for margin of victory. The late David Rothman had a formula that used to be incorporated into the BCS until they took it out under claims of "sportsmanship". His formula is in the public domain, and those rankings can be found here. These are here to serve as something of a guideline to help confirm what my numbers and the "eye test" are giving me.

There's no exact method by which I'm seeding everyone; it's more of a "Take all the information available, and try to make an educated decision." So without further ado, here's the first set of playoff seedings. As a clue for what the abbrevations are, PP stands for "Playoff Points"; "NCSS" is the "Non Conference Schedule Strength", a school's score that gets averaged into the conference rankings I've been doing the past few weeks; "SAG" is Jeff Sagarin's "ELO_SCORE" on his webpage linked above which incorporates scores of games and is likely a more perfect system than mine; and "FACT" uses David Rothman's old formula.


Friday, October 18, 2013

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 8

I'm running behind schedule this week. Considering the travel I had planned this past weekend to California, I didn't get a chance to input numbers for this week's schedule. What also didn't help matters is the fact that I lost my original spreadsheet that had all my numbers for the season to date. I'm sunk. So, I had to completely rebuild the database from scratch.

Fortunately, after a couple hours of intensive effort I was able to rebuild the rankings and we should be ready to go again. The haves and have-nots are starting to distinguish themselves in college football, but I'm not quite ready yet to start setting up playoff seedings. That should be coming soon. So for this week, another in the grand scheme of conference play, here are the updated rankings. You can view last week's here.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Ten Years After Hell

With my travel to California over the weekend I didn't get a chance to really write anything during that time, but I knew a major anniversary to one of the most significant sporting events of my lifetime was coming up. And it pains me. Comcast Sports Net Chicago is showing a documentary on it tonight, and part of me wants to watch it. That part of me is a masochist.

I shouldn't need to explain the history of Cub futility over the decades, but every Cub fan since 1908 has had at least one defining "Cub" moment that has haunted them. For me, it came in 2003.

My parents moved to the Chicago area in 1984. My dad grew up a Twins fan and followed them closely, but considering the time, he wound up following the Cubs on their run to their first playoff berth in nearly 40 years. That, combined with the experience the bleachers provided for a low price (ah, the '80s...) sucked him in and he became a fan of the Cubs as well. It worked, since interleague play hadn't been invented yet and the only way the Cubs and Twins would face off was in the World Series, it worked (since, according to him, the odds of it happening were pretty much nil).

I started going to games in 1998 and got caught in the Sosa/McGwire race, which almost overshadowed the fact that the Cubs made the playoffs. Of course, they were promptly swept out of the postseason and the team fell back into relative obscurity.

Then 2003 came around. I remember reading my SI For Kids preview issue and saw the Cubs picked 3rd behind the Cardinals and Astros. I thought it was fair. But the team overachieved early on. I got to game in June against the Brewers which, to this day, is still the best baseball game I've ever been to. They got away with robbery from the Pirates, took 4 of 5 from the Cardinals in an early September series at Wrigley, and made it into the playoffs in a Saturday doubleheader at the Friendly Confines as the city celebrated. We were back.



A hotly contested series with Atlanta was fun to watch, but also somewhat agonizing, yet the Cubs pulled it out in 5, making it the first playoff series win in 95 years. When the wild card Marlins advanced on the other side, I thought we were golden. A World Series berth was palpable. We could feel it. Even a tough loss in Game 1 wasn't a setback. The Cubs won a blowout in Game 2, needed extras to win in Game 3, and pretty convincingly beat Florida in Game 4 to reach the doorstep.

Josh Beckett wanted to delay the Cubs' advance, and threw a gem in Game 5 to delay the end. Or so I'd thought. I remember riding to school with my mom, a friend and his sister, and we were pretty confident going into the day of Game 6 that the Cubs had only lost because the Cubs were destined to go to the World Series in front of 40,000 of their loyal, rabid fans, plus thousands more who had flocked to the neighborhood. And for most of the evening, it seemed like it was meant to be. Then the eighth inning started.

You all know what happened then. I think I watched from my family room, but I don't remember for sure. I just remember the agony of the Bartman incident, and I feel awful for the guy now, though I am glad he's mostly left alone. A lot of the Facebook statuses I've seen in the last day or so have been sympathetic towards a man who faced death threats for reasons I still don't understand. In that immediate moment, it was a close play along the wall, too tough to really overturn. But would any of us have done anything different than what he did that fateful night ten years ago? The man next to him nearly faced the brunt of the wrath until FOX's crew started looking closer. Poor Bartman has been villified ever since when he's not the person who should be blamed.

Realistically, fingers can be pointed at Dusty Baker for leaving Mark Prior in the game too long (and this has always been Baker's Achilles heel). We could blame Moises Alou for freaking out too much about that fly ball when he even admitted later he had no shot at it. A fellow Cubs fan on Twitter has taken to blaming Bernie Mac for reasons I don't fully understand. But for me, the culprit always has been and always will be Alex Gonzalez. Never mind the fact that he was a key part of the team throughout the season. That botched ground ball is what sticks out to me. If he gloves that, it's a double play and the Cubs go to the bottom of the 8th still up 3-0. Whether the 9th inning would have gone okay or not obviously, I'll never know. But I am convinced to this day that this is what doomed the Cubs.

The next morning was obviously sobering for Cubs fans. Even a Kerry Wood home run wasn't enough to stem the tide the Marlins gained from the night before. I went up to my room for the ninth inning, where I saw the dream come to an end.

As far as I can remember, losses in sports have only made me cry twice in my lifetime. The more recent one was my senior year of high school as a manager of Aurora Christian's basketball team. We won 20 games and captured the first regional title in a while for the school before falling in the sectional title game to a tough Byron team. That was the end of my official run with ACS basketball. The other time sports made me cry was after that Game 7. To this day it still hurts.

At the end of the day though, this isn't the end of the world. There are far more important things in this life and finishing high school and college and planning a wedding while entering the work force make you realize that. But the beauty of sports is that it can give us an escape from reality for a while. That can make the highs higher. But it can also make the lows lower. The pain from being that close to seeing history is still there. But life goes on. Maybe that, along with prompt exits in 2007 and 2008 have tempered my expectations as a Cub fan. But the events that transpired ten years ago sadly live on in the lore of a franchise filled with sadness and disappointment. And it's a lore that will stick with Cubs fans for a long time. But hopefully not too long. I still hope that one October, the north side of Chicago will be rocking, Steve Goodman will play on, and a city waiting 105 years for magic to happen will finally get to experience the party it has long desired.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

COAS/SSLYAR Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 6

Five weeks of games have provided plenty of drama and excitement so far this NFL season. I've actually gotten to watch a decent amount so far with my office televising all Bears games on the wall of TV's. It's been awesome for them to do. I just don't know how much of Sunday's games I'll get to see as I fly out to California tonight.

And so far, collectively we've been pretty good at prognosticating results against the spread as part of this coalition. Last week we probably had the most picks in common, only disagreeing on two games, but I picked both correctly to widen my lead to 7. But any groupthink that prevailed last week is gone this week as we disagree on 8 games this time. Could be a tumultuous week. Let's get to it.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 7

Another weekend gone by, and it's time to look ahead to the next weekend of college football. There was a little worry with some of the service academies being unable to play due to the government shutdown, but they allowed the athletes to play and we had our full slate of games this week.

So as we move forward into Week 7 of the 2013 season, we're down to 17 unbeaten teams left in the FBS. Odds are a few more will get knocked off, but depending on how many more fall this week I may or may not be able to start playoff seedings next week. I'm all for a little BCS chaos though.

Below, you will find updated rankings for non-conference scheduling. Obviously at this stage of the season, there's not much to report on, considering last week there wasn't a lot of movement, but there also weren't any games against lower level competition. We'll see if that same luxury holds this time around. For last week's games, you can see the rankings here.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 6

We're through five weeks of the college football slate, where supposedly, "Every game counts." So far, for 20 of these teams, these games have really "counted" as they are the elite group that have run the table. Four each are in the ACC and Pac-12, and three apiece reside in the Big 12 and Big Ten. With this many unbeatens, it's still too soon to really start putting together a prospective playoff bracket. While I'm continuing to keep track of the Road-Home Disparity Index listed in my opening post, even that is still a bit premature with no one having played half their slate yet, but it's something I've kept track of. And yes, there are a lot of teams with heavy imbalances towards home games, though a couple of the mid-major conferences are actually in the positive rankings with all the road trips so far.

At this point, I would expect a lot to change in the weekly rankings though with conference play really starting to pick up, but I'm here to chart any changes that do happen, and there are always a few. So below are the updated rankings factoring in the upcoming week's games. For reference, you can view last week's rankings here.


Tuesday, October 1, 2013

2013 MLB Awards

Being in Chicago, baseball season wasn't overly exciting. Yet I continued tradition and made it to Wrigley, having done so at least once every year since 1998, though the first trip involved my being kidnapped to go (but what can I say, I enjoyed being kidnapped). I also got to make it to see the Stanley Cup, which was awesome, even if Coach Q didn't do a victory lap around the warning track. A trip to Milwaukee also appeared on the docket this year and we got to introduce Kristen to Miller Park's fare. I think she enjoyed the trip just based on that.

For the first time I also actively participated in a fantasy baseball league with a bunch of people on Twitter from various different places. (I played in a couple leagues in years past that I didn't pay attention to; won the first year, and ended up in last place the following year.) By the start of May, I led the Perfect Strangers league after a couple dominant weeks, then was never knocked off that perch despite the best efforts of another owner who gave me a hell of a fight in the title matchup this week, so much so that I needed the tiebreaker of winning our regular season matchups to pull victory out of my behind. Really though, I have to tip my hat to a great group of people that made this a fun league to play in and for making it competitive to the end. (And yes, I took a potshot at Jeff Loria with my team name. I stand by my decision.)

So with playing fantasy, I had to pay attention to what was going on over the course of the whole season. As such, hopefully I have some level of qualifications to pick out award winners for the 2013 campaign that just broke a tie for a wild card spot and we still have a great, open playoff left to go. But with the regular season done, it's time to look back and hand out awards for the season.