2014 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 1

We're here! The college football season officially kicks off tomorrow night, and with that, the preparations for the playoffs begin! You can read up on how the playoffs will be set up at the introductory post here. But basically, every Tuesday will be the kickoff of a new week of the season, so every Tuesday I will go through the schedule for the upcoming week and break it down for the NCSS ranking.

While it's imperfect, basically either going on the road or playing a "Power conference" opponent gets you more points, while teams are penalized for cupcake games (even though I understand their purpose, as far as your strength of schedule goes, you deserve a hit for it). What I do in this post is take the average score for each conference on a week by week basis (rounded to the nearest hundredth for ease), with some specifics about what teams are doing. On the whole, the independents will obviously have the highest scores, followed by teams that have more non-conference games (likely, the SEC with its 8 game conference slates will have higher scores than the Big XII teams, with their 9 game conference slates), so it's a flawed system in some ways. But it can help determine the strength of the part of the schedule teams can control. Let's take a look at our opening slate.

1. Conference USA (1.46). Bolstered by only having a pair of FCS opponents (Florida International and Old Dominion are the guilty parties), these guys are far and away off to the best start. Florida Atlantic, Louisiana Tech, North Texas and Southern Mississippi open at "Power conference" schools. Marshall, Rice, UTEP and UTSA are all on the road as well to start the season. Why can't more teams do this rather than imbalance the schedule?
2. Mountain West (0.92). Utah State, Fresno State and UNLV all open on the road at "Power conference" opponents. This helps when you consider that Air Force, Wyoming, Nevada, San Diego State and San Jose State open with dessert. Boise State, Colorado State and Hawaii (I'm on the Rainbow Warrior bandwagon for no other reason than I spent 2 weeks in Maui. Sue me.) also face major opponents at home or a neutral site.
3. Sun Belt (0.73). Of the 11 teams, five (Arkansas State, Georgia State, Louisiana-Lafayette, New Mexico State and Texas State) are getting their FCS games out of the way early. This is more than offset by Georgia Southern, Idaho, and new FBS member Appalachian State kicking off the year in a "Power conference" stadium.
4. Pac 12 (0.67). The top "Power conference" to start the season, despite Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford (which might be a first), Arizona State and Utah paying out to start the season. Cal does open at Northwestern while UCLA starts in Virginia for their first games.
5. SEC (0.64). I rounded the numbers to the nearest hundredth just to make sorting easier, but I had to unround it to see who was higher between the SEC and #6 on this list. Turns out the SEC was higher. It helps that they only have Kentucky and Missouri feasting on cupcakes. There are no "Power conference" road trips, but Alabama and LSU face teams from those conferences at neutral sites. Georgia also hosts Clemson, which is good for this score.
6. American Athletic (0.64). The first AAC game of the year is a conference tilt, while SMU and Temple are off to face "Power conference" opponents. Meanwhile, East Carolina, Memphis and South Florida drag this score down a little bit.
7. Big 10 (0.50). Were it not for the fact that Jim Delaney got two new subjects under his watch, half the conference would be in line for dessert this week: Indiana, Maryland, Michigan State, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota all play FCS schools. Rutgers opens at Pac 12 member Washington State, while Ohio State, Northwestern, and Wisconsin all open against other "Power conference" schools.
8. ACC (0.43). Clemson opening against Georgia gives the ACC a large chunk of its points. Wake Forest actually has the decency to open against a mid major on the road, so some sense is on display in Week 1. Unfortunately, Syracuse, Duke, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech all face cupcakes.
9. Big XII (0.30). Iowa State, Kansas State, TCU and Texas Tech all open with FCS foes. This is offset by a couple neutral site games against big opponents for West Virginia and Oklahoma State. Doesn't amount to much for these guys, but they're better than the last place conference by a pretty good margin.
10. MAC (0.08). MACtion is off to a slow start this year. Western Michigan visits Purdue for pretty much the only boost this metric can give. Akron, Buffalo, Ball State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Northern Illinois and Toledo all start with cupcakes.

For the record, the independents have an average NCSS of 1.25 to start the year, which would be second if they were their own conference.

I promised transparency with this year's system, and I will deliver. If you want to see the spreadsheet containing all the data so far (which is one column on one spreadsheet, but will fill up quickly), you can view it here. It's available for all the Internet to see, and you don't need to have a Google account of any kind to view it. If I goofed on any of my work here, or if you have a comment on scores or anything pertaining to the Death to the BCS Playoffs, please feel free to leave one here.

The next college football-related post will be on Monday, when I look over the results from the week and compile the Playoff Points. I'll be honest... after Week 1, everyone will have zero points based on how it works, but you can follow along on Monday with that new post.

Tomorrow I'm back to NFL previews as we head out to cover the AFC East.