2016 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 9 Mock Bracket

I guess today you can call me Dr. Frankenstein.

Halloween just happens to fall on a Monday this year, which is when I'm doing my mock college football playoff brackets. And given the carnage that took place over the weekend, the name seems appropriate.

Just five undefeated teams remain at the FBS level, and no more than one in any given conference. The good news is that this helps free up some at large berths. The bad news is that picking out my conference "champions" for the week is going to be difficult, as I have to really look at standings.

As a refresher, the Death to the BCS Playoffs are the format created by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan in an effort to get rid of the elitism rampant in big time college football. They created a 16 team field filled with all ten conference champions and six at large teams, though their method of filling the bracket was left to a committee. As a committee of one, I look at records and try to fill that in with seven metrics: Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS), First Degree (PP1), Second Degree (PP2), and Adjusted Playoff Points (aPP), and computer rankings by Jeff Sagarin (SAG), the late David Rothman (ROTH), and All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS). These kind of organically merge together to seed the field 1-16, with home field advantage going to the higher seeds for the first three rounds. This means the top two seeds get three home games assuming we rock chalk, the top four seeds get two, and a top eight spot earns you a first round home date. So, without further ado, let's check out the latest mock bracket.

2016 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 9

I'm running behind this week, but it was to be expected with North Central College's Homecoming this weekend and my five year college reunion where I saw all of three people I graduated with, one of whom was my wife and the other of whom is a good friend of ours that we see fairly regularly. Though we did get to see the first half of North Central's trouncing of Carroll in my first game back at Benedetti-Wehrli Stadium since the 2010 Quarterfinals against Whitewater.

But while all that was going on, sheer, unadulterated chaos unfolded across the nation at the FBS level, and I need to sort through the madness in order to try and build a playoff bracket again.

You can view last week's rankings here, and can check out my season introductory post for a brief primer on how all of this works.

2016 COAS Pigskin Pick 'Em: Week 8

It's a little crazy to think we're almost halfway through the NFL season, but here we are.

Our consortium continues to plug along, with Adam still holding onto first place, though his lead is a little tenuous at this point. He had a bit of a down Week 7 as I took three of our five disputed games to narrow the gap between the top and the bottom to eight games, though I've almost caught up to my dad for fourth place. Gotta start somewhere.

You can view a full breakdown of our picks in relation to each other here. We haven't done very well on consensus picks this season, and Adam is largely in the lead thanks to going 5-6 on hero picks thus far.

This week, Adam and I disagree on a whopping eight games out of the 13 being played due to byes. It's a huge chance for me to continue to try to bite into his lead and make things interesting as we approach the second half of our season. Either that, or Adam is a genius and I'll be out of the running. Hopefully the former.

2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 9

We have a little over a month of season left, and a lot can yet change in the ranks of college football.

For the most part though, these rankings are reasonably established. Although our Week 7 leader dropped 3 spots last week, everyone else has stayed in a fairly solid order since the first month of the season ended. With conference play firmly in hand, this is to be expected.

However, with four independent teams and other non-conference games still on the slate, this is a measurement I continue to make on a weekly basis. If you need a refresher on how this works of if you're new to Confessions of a Sportscaster and have no idea what NCSS is, you can review my season introduction post for a primer on this metric and what it means. For now, let's look at the non-conference matchups this week.

2016 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 8 Mock Bracket

The loss of a couple undefeated teams is definitely throwing a monkey wrench into things this week. There are officially nine teams left without a blemish on their records, though one of them is ineligible for the Death to the BCS Playoffs this season.

So there are eight eligible undefeated teams who are going to be making an appearance in today's field, which leaves eight spots for other teams to stake a claim to. Conference champions get an automatic bid, but with the number of unbeatens dropping, we're going to have to decide between teams with losses to fill the field.

This is a continuation of the brainchild of Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan, taking their brilliant creation and trying to apply it to the current season. You can view my first mock of the season for something of a primer on how this works. In a nutshell though, berths and seedings are dependent on Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS), First Degree (PP1), Second Degree (PP2), and Adjusted Playoff Points (aPP), and computer rankings by Jeff Sagarin (SAG), the late David Rothman (ROTH), and All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS), with myself serving as the selection committee using these rankings to help make an educated decision.

2016 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 8

I'm running a little behind this week due to my being sick yesterday morning, so I took a little longer to get this write up completed than I had intended. However, I did get the numbers updated yesterday.

With this in mind, it's time to take a look by conference and see where everyone is at with regards to their Playoff Points. All of this will help set up my third mock Death to the BCS Playoffs bracket later today.

For comparison's sake, you can view last week's rankings here. For a refresher on how these metrics work, you can check back at my season preview post.

2016 COAS Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 7

I had a decent bounceback week in Week 6 of our consortium's picks against the spread, but unfortunately I haven't gained any ground.

Adam and I split our six disputed games last week, leaving us where we were the week before. He has a nine game lead over me and remains in first place, maintaining a three game lead over my cousin Grant. Meanwhile, I'm still in last place, though I picked up a couple games on my dad and Logan to keep everyone reasonably well packed in together.

We've got another two teams on bye this week, leaving us with 15 games to pick. Adam and I disagree on five games on this week's slate. If you want a breakdown of how everyone has picked in comparison to each other, I've got an updated breakdown available here.

2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 8

With a quick look at the overall schedule, we are into the second half of the college football season. Most of the haves and have-nots have been established, as I have two mock Death to the BCS Playoff brackets for the season in the books. With seven more weeks' worth of games to play though, there's a lot of data left to collect.

This also means we're approaching Coward Week in about a month, which I think is what I'm going to call it formally in the future because it's not just Nick Saban who's a coward.

We saw a little movement in last week's rankings, though the MAC has been at or near the top pretty much all season to date. With conference play in full swing though, most of the rankings changes are minimal. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how this metric works, check back to the season introduction post.

2016 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 7 Mock Bracket

In theory, at least, this process should be getting easier.

Last week I unveiled this season's first mock playoff bracket based on the format put together by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan. I continue to cite them in all of these posts because I can't take credit for the idea for this format. It was their brainchild, and they deserve all of the credit.

They didn't delve much into how to decide that field, except that all conference champions would receive an automatic bid. How the seedings would be assigned is left to a selection committee. For the purposes of COAS, I am that selection committee.

I use a number of metrics to help me decide the teams who make it and their seeds. I combine the use of Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS), First Degree, Second Degree, and Adjusted Playoff Points (PP1, PP2, and aPP, respectively), and then balance that out with computer rankings derived from formulas created by Jeff Sagarin (SAG), the late David Rothman (ROTH), and now from the website All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS). These factors all combine somewhat organically to build the bracket.

If you want an explanation on these scores, you can view that in last week's mock post. For now, let's build a playoff.

2016 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 7

The really important trophy, for me, is back where it belongs. So while I celebrate the forces of good triumphing over the dark forces from northern DuPage County, I'm looking up at the D-I level as well to see how things have changed after Week 7.

We're down to just one winless team in Rice, while a number of undefeated teams still stand. That will make my second mock bracket a bit of a challenge, but that comes later.

You can come back and view last week's rankings here. You can also flash back to August for a primer on how these metrics work. Let's crunch the numbers.

2016 COAS Pigskin Pick 'Em: Week 6

We're onto Week 6 of the NFL season and ohmygodwhatishappening.

After a couple solid weeks got me back into the mix a little bit, I did not have a very good Week 5, as Adam took six of our seven disputed games and almost swept the early games for the second straight week. He's now firmly in first place in our consortium, and if I had to pinpoint one X-factor through five weeks for him: he's 3 for 3 on hero picks. You can see a full breakdown of how we've picked in relation to each other here.

So as I attempt to climb the ladder from nine back of the lead and four back of the closest person, Adam and I disagree on six of the 15 games on this week's slate. Let's get to it!

2016 NBA/ABA Tournament of Champions: Championship

Way back in April, I announced that I was going to undergo a major project over the span of about six months. The last 65 NBA champions, along with the nine ABA champions, were going to compete to find the greatest team of all time. I've run this experiment a couple times before coming to the same conclusion: the 1996 Chicago Bulls are the greatest. I wanted to include the ABA teams, however, because to exclude them might cloud things a little bit.

Those 74 teams were narrowed to 72 in June, and the ABA teams played a single round robin amongst themselves to give me a baseline to judge them by. That set the stage for a five week long tournament to narrow the field even further down to 32. And now, just two teams remain.

In one corner, we have a blue blood champion that has had some success in the first two tournaments. The 1997 Chicago Bulls romped through the first three rounds in 2013, losing just two games total before falling in seven to the eventual finalist in the 2005 San Antonio Spurs. 2015 was also kind to Chicago as they won that tournament's Group E with an 11-3 record and had no trouble in the first two rounds before dropping a heartbreaking Game 7 at Oracle Arena to the 2015 Golden State Warriors. After stewing on that loss, they came into the 2016 Tournament of Champions as a contender once again and held their own, going 13-3 and winning Group G. It's been a tough road in the Elimination Stage, but the Bulls have done their damage, knocking off the 2003 Spurs before avenging their elimination to the '05 Spurs. They beat their younger selves from 1992 then got arguably a sweeter revenge, knocking off the '15 Warriors in Game 7 to make up for last year's shortfall. Here stands Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and company: just four wins from immortality.

Standing in their way is a true Cinderella story. The 1985 Los Angeles Lakers easily dispatched their first round opponent in 2013 and got a Game 1 winner at the buzzer from Kurt Rambis in Round 2 before dropping four straight to the 1983 Philadelphia 76ers, including a winnable Game 4 where they blew an 11 point lead in regulation and lost on a buzzer beating dunk in overtime. Los Angeles went 10-4 in Group B last year, good for third place. They pulled a seven game upset in the first round and responded to a Game 1 loss in the next round with four straight wins to advance to the quarterfinals before running into the buzzsaw that was the 1996 Chicago Bulls. The Lakers got put in a tough group this year and managed to sneak into the Elimination Stage with an 8-8 record and overcome the 1993 Bulls thanks to the tiebreaker. They were the second-worst team to advance, but shocked the world by sweeping their group's winner and #2 overall seed in the 1990 Detroit Pistons. They then managed to get by three different iterations of Laker teams, starting with the constantly contending and underrated 1972 team before surviving a seven game war with their 1987 counterparts and knocking off Shaq and Kobe's 2002 team to arrive at the ultimate stage.

These two titans have earned their way here, but they need to win four more games to claim the prize as the greatest team of all time. To determine that, we are once again playing a best of sever series in a 2-2-1-1-1 format. Home court advantage goes to the Bulls by virtue of their winning their group while the Lakers finished in fourth place. All simulations are once again provided by WhatIfSports.com. And now, without further ado, let's crown a champion.

2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 7

It's been a busy 15 hours or so of football-related posts for me as I catch up following a long weekend. We're almost to the halfway mark of the season, if you can believe that. There's still a ton of time left in the season, even if we're almost out of non-conference games.

However, mainly because of the independents but also because there are some out of conference games that don't involve those teams still to come, I'm continuing to follow up on the schedules for each week by conference, though I'm not commenting on any of the conference games because, for the purpose of this metric, it doesn't matter.

The rankings are mostly stable as we go from week to week, but unexpected changes can and do happen. Either way, if you want a refresher on how this metric works, you can view that at my season intro post. Let's get to the schedule.

2016 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 6 Mock Bracket

All of my watching of games, and all of the data entry that goes with it... it all comes down to this.

I think this is a tie for the earliest I've ever been able to do this, but now that it's impossible for me to leave out any of the 11 remaining undefeated teams in college football, the time has come for me to build my first mock bracket for the Death to the BCS Playoffs.

Regular readers of Confessions of a Sportscaster are probably familiar with the format of this playoff, but if you're new here or missed out on my season introduction post, the basic premise of the Death to the BCS Playoffs follows the ideas set forth in the book of the same title pictured here written by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan. The College Football Playoff and its four team playoff is a good start, but the system still discriminates against some of the smaller conferences at this level by refusing to give them a chance to play for a national title. The Death to the BCS Playoffs remedy this by granting an automatic bid to each of the 10 conference champions, and we then fill the field with six at large teams for a total of 16. This then plays out in a classic bracket, but instead of playing quarterfinals or semifinals at bowl game sites, we up the stakes for the regular season by seeding the teams 1-16 and giving home field advantage for the first three rounds to the highest seeds before playing the national title game at the Rose Bowl because it's the Rose Bowl.

Photo by Scott Halleran (Getty Images)

To fill this field, especially for the mocks, I need to make some assumptions about presumed conference "champions" until the actual title games take place. But to seed the teams, I use a wealth of data I've collected. Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS) gets factored in to a minor degree just to see what kind of non-conference slate each team plays, though as a general rule the Group of Five teams score higher than those from Power Conferences, just based on how the metric is calculated. I also factor in Playoff Points of three varieties: First Degree (PP1), which is just a sum of wins of defeated opponents by any given team, Second Degree (PP2), which averages the First Degree Playoff Points of each defeated opponent by a given team, and a new one this year in Adjusted Playoff Points (aPP), which takes the aforementioned sum of wins by defeated opponents, but subtracts the losses of opponents that beat the given team to arrive at a final score, which can be negative. All of this data can be found on this Google Sheet.

Photo from sagarin.com.

In an effort to remove any potential bias on my part, I also take multiple computer rankings into account to serve as a check as well as additional data to help arrive at a reasonable conclusion. Here's the important catch: unlike the old BCS, which refused to factor in margin of victory out of some misguided notion of sportsmanship, these computer rankings all include that factor because blowout wins should be valued more than a narrow victory. The two computer ranking systems I have used in years past are Jeff Sagarin's (SAG) rankings, as he used to do rankings for the BCS, but also did a ranking that factored margin of victory in. The late David Rothman (ROTH) built a similar ranking formula that included margin of victory, and before he died he made his formula public. A UCLA faculty member uses that formula to set up rankings of his own. Since said faculty member hasn't run his numbers for the 2016 season yet, I'm adding in a third ranking, and will use all three for the final selection. I discovered that the team over at All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS) run a formula to build a ranking as well, and they also factor in score, at least as a check, to help arrive at a final conclusion.

All of these data will combine together in a somewhat organic fashion (read: I look things over and try to make a fair decision based on the available data) to seed the 16 teams who will face off for the national championship. So, without further ado, here's my first mock bracket for the 2016 season.

2016 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 6

I took this weekend off to get some stuff done at home, hence the delay on this post until Tuesday afternoon. Of course, with another week of college football in the books, I need to get to work on updating things.

Looking at the standings, we're down to 11 undefeated teams. After looking close at how they're distributed, I have found that they're spread out enough for me to build my first mock bracket. That will come a little later this afternoon when I can look at everything and make a good call on how to build the bracket.

In the meantime, for reference you can check last week's rankings here. If you need a refresher on how most of this works, you can check that out at my season introduction post. For now, let's look at the points.

2016 COAS Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 5

We're a quarter of the way (give or take) through the NFL season, and our consortium of pickers are all not exactly bunched up, but there's not a huge gap either.

I'm still in last place, but I at least have some company in the basement after blanking on the early Sunday games but sweeping the late games as well as grabbing the Thursday night game to finish with my second straight winning week. Adam had his best week of the year to date, sweeping our three disputed games to go up by four, but he trails my dad by one through four weeks.

If you want to see a breakdown of the picks based on what we've all been picking, you can view a spreadsheet of those stats here. Through four weeks I'm the only person in our group who has yet to go hero, but I've struggled everywhere else a little bit. Hopefully my luck continues this week and I can close the gap with the leaders.

There are only 14 games this week thanks to byes, and Adam and I disagree on seven of those games. Let's take a look at the week.

2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 6

We're well into the month of October now, and conference play is in full swing.

Last week's rankings saw a little bit of movement as a few conferences were still wrapping up their out of league slates, but I expect that most of the rest of the way will be pretty straightforward. With the handful of independent teams though, there will still be a few non-conference games on the docket, and we haven't gotten to Nick Saban Is a Coward Week yet. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, here's a look at this week's non-conference games. If you want a primer on how these rankings work, you can view that at my season introductory post.

COAS Hands Out 2016 MLB Awards

I'm following up on an annual feature here on Confessions of a Sportscaster. I debated about pushing this back until Wednesday to keep each day with one post, but I decided to push the timetable up to today since the season is concluded. This way no playoff results cloud my judgment.

For the most part, I've decided on a lot of these votes for awards already and it was just a matter of waiting for the final numbers. With those in the books, I am going to make my picks for Manager of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Cy Young Award, and Most Valuable Player for each league.

2016 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 5

Through five weeks of the college football season, we're down to just 16 undefeated teams left in all of FBS football. This would, in many circumstances, mean I could start looking at building mock playoff brackets. However, because many of these undefeated teams are bunched up in a few different conferences, giving an automatic bid to every conference champion would mean that some undefeated teams would be left out in the cold. I can't in good conscience do that.

As such, I will continue to just pore over Playoff Points numbers again this week based on the results from the weekend. I imagine that once again the rankings from last week will by and large remain the same, it's just the scores that will increase (or, in the case of Adjusted Playoff Points, decrease).

If you want a look at how these scores are calculated, you can view my season preview post. Here's our data from Week 5.