2014 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 13

With me running a day late on college football stuff this week, I'm behind by a couple games this week. Last night, there were a pair of MAC games, which fortunately doesn't impact this metric.

There will be a fair amount of non-conference games in this week as teams wind down their regular seasons. The next couple weeks will see some major non-conference games to finish out slates, as well as defining games to determine division or conference championships. Unfortunately, for some teams, this is also an opportunity to be complete and utter cowards of the highest caliber. You probably know who I'm referring to.

If you want to refer back to last week's numbers, you can view them here. Let's see how this week looks.

1. Conference USA (0.00, 6.23; LW: 1). No change.
2. Mountain West (0.00, 6.17; LW: 2). No change.
3. American Athletic (0.00, 6.09; LW: 3). No change.
4. MAC (0.00, 6.08; LW: 4). No change.
5. Sun Belt (0.55, 6.00; LW: 5). South Alabama visits South Carolina while Georgia State visits Clemson.
6. Big 10 (0.00, 4.43; LW: 6). No change.
7. ACC (0.21, 3.57; LW: 7). Clemson hosts Georgia State and Louisville visits Notre Dame.
8. Pac 12 (0.00, 3.17; LW: 8). No change.
9. Big XII (0.00, 3.10; LW: 9). No change.
10. SEC (-0.21, 2.57; LW: 10). South Carolina hosts South Alabama, while Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Auburn all host D-IAA squads.

A visual depiction of the SEC's schedule this week.

I went back to look at the examples from the last two years of this SEC cowardice to see how bad this year's was. I didn't track it as well as I could have in 2012, but from what I can tell, the SEC suffered a 0.35 point drop from Week 11 to Week 12 (they had one good non-conference game offset by seven cupcakes). In 2013, the damage was more limited as only three teams got in on the weak scheduling. This year is almost as bad as 2012 was, saved solely by the fact that South Carolina is facing a team that probably didn't get promoted to the top level until after this game was scheduled. Either way... this is an absolute disgrace to competitive football. I have half a mind to eliminate some SEC teams from the Death to the BCS Playoffs, but more likely, I'll just drop them by a few seeds. Just get this out of the way early. Don't do this for your second-to-last game of the year.

For full disclosure: the independents had a weekly score of 0 in NCSS; Notre Dame's gains from hosting Louisville were negated by Army and BYU hosting FCS teams as well this week. For Army, it's their second, but they visited Yale earlier this season, so I won't suspend them (though their record prevents them from making the Death to the BCS Playoffs). BYU, meanwhile, sees its first FCS action of the year. The negation keeps the independents' average NCSS ranking at 16.50. So really, I shouldn't be harping solely on the SEC, but they're far and away the worst offenders. If you want to see the overall numbers for each school, you can view my spreadsheet here.

I'm delaying my college football posts by a day again next week in observation of my 25th birthday. Tuesday I'll be back with a look at the weekend's action, followed up by one of the last few mock brackets.