2014 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 14

I missed one MAC game last night. It won't impact the numbers I'm running today, but I need to make sure I get this taken care of.

For a majoring of the FBS conferences, this is the final week of the regular season. Next week has most of the conference championship games, plus final games for the other conferences. This week will probably be the final week that I do anything with NCSS, though I'll probably take a token look next week.

This week's action is bound to be better than last week's, if for no other reason than the SEC are done being cowards. I'm pretty sure we're done with this playing cupcake nonsense, at least until August.

Let's take a look at the non-conference matchups this weekend.

1. Conference USA (0.00, 6.23; LW: 1). No change. 
2. Mountain West (0.00, 6.17; LW: 2). No change. 
3. Sun Belt (0.09, 6.09; LW: 5). South Alabama hosts Navy.
4. American Athletic (0.00, 6.09; LW: 3). No change. 
5. MAC (0.00, 6.08; LW: 4). No change. 
6. Big 10 (0.00, 4.43; LW: 6). No change. 
7. ACC (0.64, 4.21; LW: 7). Louisville hosts Kentucky, Clemson hosts South Carolina, Georgia Tech visits Georgia, and Florida State hosts Florida. 
8. SEC (0.79, 3.36; LW: 10). Kentucky visits Louisville, South Carolina visits Clemson, Georgia hosts Georgia Tech, and Florida visits Florida State.
9. Pac 12 (0.17, 3.33; LW: 8). USC hosts Notre Dame and California hosts BYU.
10. Big XII (0.00, 3.10; LW: 9). No change.

In the interests of full disclosure: the independents added another 2 points to their NCSS average, raising it to 18.50. 

This might be where some of you might start yelling at me about "See?! The SEC isn't a bunch of cowards! They aren't last in the nation in this metric you created!" Yeah, well... the two conferences they just jumped ahead of play nine conference games, while the SEC plays eight. It stands to reason that the SEC would have a higher score than those two conferences. Simple math. It would be higher if the SEC would actually try to do more. In fairness, they will next year, requiring every school to play a major opponent. I just wish they'd stop with this end of the year FCS nonsense. It's a disgrace to the so-called "value" of the regular season.

If you want to see the spreadsheet that contains all of my data you can view it here. Overall though, this week will give a few conferences their champions. I'll come back on Monday with a look at the results of the weekend and then a final mock bracket before the final one can be unveiled in December.