2015 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 1

We've finally made it, football fans! The college season already began last weekend, and I had a decent seat at a bar to watch the end of North Dakota State-Montana (Montana got a BS pass interference call to extend their game-winning drive, but the Bison had time to stop them and failed. I don't blame the refs). That was, however, an FCS game, and they have an appropriate playoff.

The highest level has a playoff finally, though I think it still needs work. So once again, I'm building a playoff based on the system proposed by Wetzel, Passan and Peter. From now until the end of the season, every Tuesday I will be taking a look at the schedule for the upcoming week.

Photo by Mike Mulholland (MLive.com)

Every team will be given a score for their scheduled opponent every week. The scoring system can be found at the link above, but the basic gist of it is that teams get rewarded for road non-conference games or games against "power" conference foes, conference games have no impact on the score, and games against FCS opponents will lower the score. Two games on a schedule against an FCS opponent will result in disqualification from the Death to the BCS Playoffs, unless there's some sort of cancellation of a game due to weather or some other unforeseen act of God and the only way to get a 12th game is to schedule a second FCS opponent. I doubt this will happen, but it's an eventuality I'm prepared for.

Before I dive into the scores for Week 1, I also want to mention one other thing for the upcoming season: despite the NCAA's reversal of the penalties, Penn State remains banned from the Death to the BCS Playoffs. I'll leave my prior thoughts on the issue as my justification for this decision, and if you don't like it, tell your school not to allow a suspected subhuman monster to remain on your campus for 10 years without a police investigation.

Let's get to the scores. As a quick explanation, I will take the average score for each conference every week and rank them 1-10 (independents will naturally have the highest NCSS, so I don't rank them). I will then also include a brief rundown of their Week 1 schedules.

1. Sun Belt: 1.91. While Appalachian State and South Alabama get their cupcakes out of the way early, seven of the conference's teams are on the road to face power conference foes and get the conference a huge NCSS lead early.
2. Conference USA: 1.33. It's just Rice and Middle Tennessee on the FCS bandwagon this week, something that is more than made up for with Western Kentucky, UTEP and UTSA hitting the road to big school environments, while several others are hosting major conference schools. This is a step in the right direction.
3. Big Ten: 1.07. The B1G has four teams starting dinner with dessert in Iowa, Indiana, Rutgers and Maryland. Michigan is on the road at Utah and Ohio State travels to Virginia Tech for the big points, though many of the other teams are hosting other P5 schools or hitting the road to open the season. A strong showing overall.
4. SEC: 0.93. The conference I annually pan for their pathetic non conference scheduling actually didn't do too bad this week. While Missouri, LSU and Ole Miss are playing down a level, South Carolina, Auburn, Texas A&M and Alabama have neutral site games against major conference opposition. Mississippi State also deserves credit for traveling to Southern Mississippi.
5. MAC: 0.92. The rounding makes it look like a tie, but expanding the decimals has the MAC with a higher score than the Pac-12. Buffalo, Ball State, Miami (Ohio) and Toledo didn't help that much with their tuneup games, but Akron and Kent State's tough road trips did, as did some other good scheduling, like Western Michigan getting to host Michigan State.
6. Pac-12: 0.92. The difference was pretty minuscule with only Stanford getting the maximum possible point total, though several other teams have good scores for the week. Cal, Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State have their cupcakes in Week 1.
7. Big XII: 0.70. Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State and Texas Tech scheduled FCS opponents in Week 1, but you have teams like Baylor, Oklahoma State, Texas and TCU all on the road in Week 1, with the Horned Frogs getting the best one by traveling to Minnesota.
8. ACC: 0.29. Half the conference decided to hit the dessert table right off the bat: Boston College, Clemson, Syracuse, Wake Forest, Georgia Tech, Miami (Florida) and Pitt all have DI-AA foes this week. Virginia travels to UCLA to try and offset this, with Louisville and North Carolina playing neutral site games and Duke hitting the road add to the numbers.
9. American Athletic: 0.08. SMU, Temple and Tulane all face major conference foes to open their calendar, but Cincinnati, Connecticut, East Carolina, South Florida, Houston, Memphis and Navy all screwed it up with FCS schools coming to town.
10. Mountain West: -0.25. This is the first time I think I've seen a conference open the season in the negative, and it's probably the worst single-week score I've ever seen. Air Force, Colorado State, Fresno State, New Mexico, Nevada, San Diego State, San Jose State, Utah State and Wyoming all get their cupcakes on their plates early. Not even good games for Boise State, Hawaii and UNLV were enough to overturn it. On the other hand, this means the Mountain West has nowhere to go but up, and they'll probably be near the top of the rankings in a month.

Because I promised transparency: to view the exact scores, you can take a look at my Google Sheet with all the scores for each team. I'll link to it in every post, plus put it up on the sidebar on the right for easy access from anywhere on Confessions of a Sportscaster.

Next week will have a slightly altered schedule, which is unusual because very rarely do Week 1 games spill over into Monday night (thanks, Ohio State and Virginia Tech). Tuesday will have the results translate into Playoff Points for you, again complete with a link to the Google Sheet, and Wednesday will bring a look at the Week 2 schedule and more NCSS points.