Another Year Fighting College Football Corruption

Another fall is upon us, and that means another three or four months up on my soapbox decrying the rampant elitism and corruption in college football. But that doesn't mean that the football itself isn't enjoyable.

That's why I'm here, every year, taking a look at the goings on. Growing up, I didn't care about college football, largely because my dad didn't. I've gotten into it a little bit more just because it's so woven into the fabric of American culture, but I have no rooting interest, other than sheer anarchy, and occasional support for a local team if they've doing well.

My main issue with college football is not the issue of whether or not players should be paid (short answer: they probably should, but maybe not in the way most other people would argue they should be), but with the terrible playoff system they have set up. It's a definite improvement over the garbage that was the BCS, but they can do better. You can read more about my views on this here and in prior season preview posts.

College Football: New Year, Same Corruption

I've been writing on Confessions of a Sportscaster for almost five years now. And for the fifth straight season, I am advocating for change at the highest level of college football. Even though, during that time, much has changed, there are still more changes that need to be made.

If you want to save yourself some time and see the back story behind a fair amount of this, you can go back and read last year's introduction post. But in a nutshell, I'm against the rampant elitism that permeates college football and creates a holier than thou culture among the Power Five conferences. Until the day they decide to break off and form their own highest level of football, I'm going to call out the bias against the rest of the schools at the FBS level who aren't given a chance to compete at the truly highest level. We can thank Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan for my views being what they are.

So over the course of the college football season, I keep track of what's going on, primarily scheduling and results, to try and build a not only more equitable playoff system, but a more fun one as well. The aforementioned authors built a new playoff system that I continue to advocate for: 16 teams, made up of the ten conference champions and six at large teams, seeded 1-16 with the first three rounds of games being played on the campus of the higher seed. It creates much more intrigue for the entirety of college football for the entire season and makes the regular season more meaningful, contrary to the argument of the powers that be, who have proven over the years that for some, the regular season means nothing.

I build and seed this playoff field based on five metrics and a degree of the Eye Test where possible.

1. Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS)
   This was my first metric, and even though it's not perfect, I still like to use it as a point against the elitism perpetuated by the powers that be. Every team gets a score from week to week that sums up at the end of the season to judge the general toughness of a non-conference schedule without looking at records. To a degree, I continue the elitism by giving higher scores to playing teams from a Power conference (but these schools are generally better), but I also blast the schools who play an FCS team. It's a necessary evil to the schedule, and one that I'm more willing to forgive at the beginning of the season than I am for the handful of SEC and ACC schools that unconscionably do this in the second to last week of the regular season. Here's the breakdown of scoring by week.
   - -1 point for playing an FCS team at home (since God forbid someone like Michigan or Florida actually travel to one of these schools)
   - 0 points for a bye week or playing an in-conference game (this will be the most common score for most teams on a weekly basis)
   - 1 point for playing an FBS team from a non-"Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
   - 2 points for playing an FBS team from a non- "Power conference" on the road or an FBS team for a "Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
   - 3 points for playing an FBS team from a "Power conference" on the road
   *NOTE: "Power conferences" are the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pac 12.
2. First Degree Playoff Points (PP1)
   This is a metric I basically stole from the IHSA. If you have two 10-2 teams, but one of them beat a bunch of 6-6, 7-5, and 8-4 teams, that's a better resume than the other who beat a bunch of 3-9 and 4-8 teams. PP1 measures the IHSA's "Combined Wins of Defeated Opponents" measurement and uses that to help determine how good a team was. It can be flawed in that losses don't impact this metric in any capacity, which means a loss to a 2-10 team is measured the same as a loss to a 12-0 team. It's something I'm considering tweaking. We'll see. One other important note with this metric is that wins against FCS opponents are worth no points.
3. Second Degree Playoff Points (PP2)
   This builds off the prior metric, and is a piece I added a couple years ago. PP2 averages the Playoff Points of defeated teams (so a three win team gets the average of the three teams they beat, while a nine win team gets the average of their nine vanquished foes factored in). This is to help balance out the previous metric and see how good the defeated teams really are. Most years, this will mean the national leaders in this metric will be teams that aren't that good but beat a really good opponent to boost their number. Like PP1, a score of zero is given for defeating an FCS opponent, which will bring down the average.
4. Rothman Computer Rankings (ROTH)
   The late David Rothman created a formula to rank college football teams, similar to the methods used to help calculate the old BCS standings. The difference is that Rothman wanted to include margin of victory, figuring it was important to help differentiate between teams. The powers that were in the BCS thought it was "unsportsmanlike" to reward running up the score, never mind that a cap could be placed on margin of victory to minimize this. Rothman's ranking was rejected by the BCS, but he continued to rank teams on his own and made his formula public domain before his death. A UCLA faculty member uses this formula and compiles the rankings. This is to help balance out any bias I may have.
5. Sagarin Computer Rankings (SAG)
   A similar tale to above, Sagarin did actually have a computer ranking used by the BCS that took margin of victory out of the equation, but he did still calculate rankings with that factor included. Using his "Final" rating, we come up with that metric, and I use that again to help factor out any bias I may have.

Using these five metrics, I build out that 16 team playoff field, with a few mock brackets as the season goes along to get a little practice in and gauge where teams are at, even though several teams end up falling out as more mocks go by. That last one is the important one though, as I use that one following all the conference title games to simulate a 16 team playoff. It's resulted in some counter-to-reality scenarios (one year, Michigan State beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl, but the Cardinal won the Death to the BCS Championship while the Spartans got upset in Round 1), but it's also produced the same national champion as reality a couple of times (Alabama's titles last year and in 2012).

Every week, I will have two or three posts with the measurements of each of these metrics sorted by conference and, when I'm not excluding any undefeated teams, mock brackets for each week. In the interest of transparency, I am also including my measurements on a publicly available Google Sheet. I will include the link with every post while also putting it on the sidebar of Confessions of a Sportscaster as well as on the COAS Tournaments Page.

One final thing: I do take differing stances on disqualifications for the Death to the BCS Playoffs than the NCAA and the Selection Committee for the College Football Playoff do. So far it has yet to impact a playoff berth, though we did come close last year. The main way for a team to be disqualified from contention for the Death to the BCS Playoffs is by playing two games against FCS competition. I understand one game as a tuneup that also funds the FCS program a little bit, even though I'm generally against the games counting and highly against them counting late in the season. Playing two, unless there's an emergency cancellation of a game and playing a second FCS team is the only way to avoid it, eliminates a team from contention.

I also want to be up front about two disqualifications before the season even starts. One of them is a stance you will know well if you are a longtime reader of Confessions of a Sportscaster: Penn State, due to their prioritizing of the well-being of the football program over the well-being of children, now apparently dating as far back as the mid-70s, is permanently banned from postseason play here. They shouldn't even have a football program, but that's another topic for another day. Due to similar circumstances surrounding sexual assaults and the lack of serious action taken by officials at Baylor, they are also banned from the Death to the BCS Playoffs. Any banned teams will still have metrics measured for the entire season, but will not be considered as part of the field of 16.

The season is kicking off on Friday, with Hawaii and California playing a game in Sydney, Australia. Hawaii is technically playing two games in Week 1, as they follow that game up a week later with a trip to Michigan. I'm figuring out how to include both of those games in their NCSS and Playoff Points scores without completely rebuilding my spreadsheet. I'll figure that out. With the rest of the nation starting as early as September 1st, I'll be back next week with a first look at NCSS rankings.

Spitting on the BCS' Grave

We interrupt the steady stream of basketball on Confessions of a Sportscaster to do something of a preview for college football.

This is my fourth season following the sport to a greater degree than I did growing up, mainly because I inherited my dad's disdain for big time college football's pathetic excuse for deciding a national champion. Where my dad was more apathetic though, I was bored and decided to advocate for a different system.

Some time back, I saw a book at I think Barnes and Noble called Death to the BCS, cowritten by Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan. These guys exposed the rampant fraud and corruption perpetrated by the now defunct postseason while eviscerating every argument its proponents made. It had an impact on me, and I continue to champion its cause in hopes that the current College Football Playoff will someday expand and stop the elitism against non-traditional "power" schools.

Since that isn't going to happen any time soon, or honestly, probably at all, I'm doing a fourth season of weekly following of the season and setting up a Wetzel/Peter/Passan-inspired playoff. Instead of the four team field officially used, I go with 16: the ten conference champions and six at-large teams. I also add a fun factor: the first three rounds are played on the campus of the higher seeded team because who wouldn't love to see postseason football at some of the most hallowed stadiums in America?

The question remains: how do we decide who makes the field (primarily the at-larges), and how do we seed them? If you follow Confessions of a Sportscaster and read these posts from last year, you probably already know, but here's a refresher for the 2015 season.

Obviously, records and such are important, but I created/adapted a few metrics to help the process along. The first and oldest of these is Non-Conference Schedule Strength, or NCSS. It's not perfect, but it helps paint a picture of each team's schedule. Obviously, the meat of a schedule is the conference slate, and has the most to do with winning a conference and getting into the postseason. Every team has differing "side dishes" as it were to fill out their 12 game gauntlet. I score each team week by week with a point total ranging from -1 on the low end to +3 on the high end depending on who their opponent is. From last year's post, here's a rundown on possible scores.

• -1 point for playing an FCS team at home (since God forbid someone like Michigan or Florida actually travel to one of these schools)
• 0 points for a bye week or playing an in-conference game (this will be the most common score for most teams on a weekly basis)
• 1 point for playing an FBS team from a non-"Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
• 2 points for playing an FBS team from a non- "Power conference" on the road or an FBS team for a "Power conference" at home or at a neutral site
• 3 points for playing an FBS team from a "Power conference" on the road
• NOTE: "Power conferences" are the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pac 12.

Year after year, I've discovered that the smaller conferences have tougher non-conference slates than the big schools because they constantly travel to the big schools. This isn't a huge deal in and of itself, but it goes against the argument made by the elitists who go on and on about how tough a schedule their big school faces. You also see every year that almost every team schedules one FCS school, usually at the beginning of the season unless you're one of the handful of cowards from the SEC who pads your win total with a cupcake in the second to last game of the year. (Looking at you, Nick Saban.)

A better metric I use is borrowed and adapted from the Illinois High School Association in playoff points. If you click the link provided, they explain how they seed their football playoffs. I use the "Combined Wins of Defeated Opponents" as First Degree Playoff Points, or PP1, as a primary factor. Any team can win nine or 10 games, but who did you beat to get there? That's where PP1 comes in. The 10 wins against really good teams are better than 10 wins against a bunch of .500 or worse teams, and that's what PP1 measures. I built on that last year though, adding Second Degree Playoff Points, or PP2. This goes a step further and takes the average of First Degree Playoff Points of each defeated team on a school's resume.

These scores then get combined with a pair of computer rankings that use margin of victory to help round things out and remove any personal bias I may have. The late David Rothman set up a ranking that was not used by the BCS because he factored in margin of victory (the BCS refused to include it out of some misguided notion of sportsmanship), and before his death put his formula in the public domain for anyone to use. A faculty member at UCLA uses this and publishes the results. I also take Jeff Sagarin's computer rankings, using the "Final" rating he comes up with instead of the BCS-based one that he was forced to use.

All of these are then loosely combined and looked at by a selection committee of one (though I am open to bringing in outside voices to help decide the field, contact me if you're interested). Last year I also took a step of transparency and posted my Non Conference Schedule Strength and Playoff Point metrics on Google Docs. I have done the same again this season: you can find my spreadsheet with NCSS and PP1/PP2 at this link. I will also post it on the front page of COAS for your convenience.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting two or three times a week with some looks at the college football world. Every week I will do a post on NCSS looking at every conference's schedule for the week and shaming every school that hosts an FCS school to pad their record (I can say that this year because NDSU doesn't have an upper level foe on their schedule this year... Go Bison.) After the games are done, I will calculate current Playoff Points and share the results, again ranking by conference. Once we get a little ways into the season and a bracket can be built without leaving out a single undefeated team, I will start doing weekly mock brackets leading up to the official reveal once all the conference champions are decided. Thursday, September 3rd is the official start of the season, kicking off with Alcorn State at Georgia Tech. I'll have a post on the first of September to look over the Week 1 schedules. Good luck to your teams this season!

2013 FBS Rankings: Week 15

Other than the annual Army-Navy game, this is it for the big time college football regular season. Most teams are done, but a handful are playing their 13th games. Heck, a couple have already played 13 games and it's throwing me off. Either way, by about midnight on Sunday, we will know who won each conference and thus earned an automatic bid to the unfortunately simulated Death to the BCS Playoffs. But for this final post analyzing schedules, I figured I'd unveil my overall rankings. It only seems fair that everyone get to see what the NCSS numbers actually look like for everyone.

Before we get into that though, I was planning on sharing the final conference rankings with updates from this week, but every game on this week's slate is in conference, so there will be no changes. What I did do is for this week, put the Army-Navy game in so that I could go ahead and run the numbers here. Since neither team is in the running for the playoffs, I don't have to worry about the implications of those games. If you want to see what ultimately became the final conference rankings, check last week's post here.

Instead today after the jump, I'll have the full, final NCSS rankings for each FBS team. As a refresher, NCSS ignores record, instead focusing on whether the teams on the non-conference schedule are in a "power conference" or not, with a bonus for playing on the road. Teams are also penalized for facing FCS competition.

Full disclosure: This should be obvious, but independents will have the highest NCSS scores since none of their games are played in conference. The Sun Belt, being an 8-team conference will also have inflated scores while the Big 12 and Pac-12 might have slightly lower scores since they only play three games outside their respective conferences.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 14

For a lot of teams, this is the end of their regular slate. For others, there's still the first weekend in December, whether it's for Game 12 or the conference title game. By then, a lot of the playoff teams will be decided, but seedings will still be up in the air.

Yesterday's batch of seedings can be found here, but today I'm focusing on one of the last sets of changes for conference's rankings of their out of conference scheduling. I think we're done with cupcakes so the SEC can come out from under its rock now. You know what, hold that thought.

For last week's rankings, click here.

NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 13

It's been a busy past few days, with North Central basketball underway, and a lot of football this past weekend. I'm looking ahead now to the upcoming week of games, seeing as the action starts tonight with a couple MAC games. These are all factors that are important going forward to the last few weeks of the season for playoff purposes.

This week's rankings will have some big movement, if my spoiler from yesterday's playoff seedings post are any indication. If you want to see where we're at through the first 12 weeks of the season, you can view last week's schedule rankings here.

NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 12

We're getting closer to the end of the regular season and the games are starting to get more dramatic and have more purpose. Granted, in reality it's only for a small handful of schools, but when approaching it with a playoff in mind, look at how many games have implications! Every game really does count!

At the lower levels this is an important week too. D-III is on its last week of the regular season, but a good chunk of the field is set in stone (including my North Central Cardinals!) and a lot of teams are fighting for those precious few at large spots. A lot of the big conferences aren't decided yet either with a few weeks to go, and most remaining games are in conference, but there are some interconference battles this week.

So if you want to see where the playoffs stand coming into this week, here's yesterday's post with the seedings. You can view last week's NCSS rankings here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 11

We're into November, and with it, approaching the end of the college football regular season. There are only four weeks left for teams to prove themselves one last time for an insane system that doesn't fairly decide a championship. But that was a rant for yesterday's post on the latest Death to the BCS Playoff seedings.

For the most part, all play is staying within conference, but there are some non-conference battles still going on, either with independent schools or pansies padding their schedule with late cupcakes.

There's not a lot of baking this week, and a few non conference battles. You can view those below, as well as up to date rankings. You can view last week's batch here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 10

We're starting to come down to the home stretch in the college football season. Most of the have-nots have been weeded out, and early yesterday I came out with new playoff seedings through 9 weeks of games.



So as we start Week 10 today, I should get back to schedule analysis. We don't have many more out of conference games, but for the independents, this is kind of important, and it's also good to document all the late-season cupcake feasting that happens (looking at you, SEC...)
 
So below you can find this week's numbers, as well as how each conference now stacks up to this point in the season. You can find last week's rankings here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 9

You know we're getting to the good part of football season when we start talking playoffs, and every game really starts to have serious implications. We are that far now, since I have my first Death to the BCS seedings out. And these will probably change a fair amount over the next month or so. Such is the nature of college football.

Now that I'm caught up on my spreadsheet and all my numbers I should be good to go to update the weekly rankings of each conference. If you want to see where everyone ranked through 8 weeks with some tweaks since I had to reenter all the numbers, you can find those rankings here. In the meantime, here's where we stand with the one game that started last night and the several more to be played yet through Saturday.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 8

I'm running behind schedule this week. Considering the travel I had planned this past weekend to California, I didn't get a chance to input numbers for this week's schedule. What also didn't help matters is the fact that I lost my original spreadsheet that had all my numbers for the season to date. I'm sunk. So, I had to completely rebuild the database from scratch.

Fortunately, after a couple hours of intensive effort I was able to rebuild the rankings and we should be ready to go again. The haves and have-nots are starting to distinguish themselves in college football, but I'm not quite ready yet to start setting up playoff seedings. That should be coming soon. So for this week, another in the grand scheme of conference play, here are the updated rankings. You can view last week's here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 7

Another weekend gone by, and it's time to look ahead to the next weekend of college football. There was a little worry with some of the service academies being unable to play due to the government shutdown, but they allowed the athletes to play and we had our full slate of games this week.

So as we move forward into Week 7 of the 2013 season, we're down to 17 unbeaten teams left in the FBS. Odds are a few more will get knocked off, but depending on how many more fall this week I may or may not be able to start playoff seedings next week. I'm all for a little BCS chaos though.

Below, you will find updated rankings for non-conference scheduling. Obviously at this stage of the season, there's not much to report on, considering last week there wasn't a lot of movement, but there also weren't any games against lower level competition. We'll see if that same luxury holds this time around. For last week's games, you can see the rankings here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 6

We're through five weeks of the college football slate, where supposedly, "Every game counts." So far, for 20 of these teams, these games have really "counted" as they are the elite group that have run the table. Four each are in the ACC and Pac-12, and three apiece reside in the Big 12 and Big Ten. With this many unbeatens, it's still too soon to really start putting together a prospective playoff bracket. While I'm continuing to keep track of the Road-Home Disparity Index listed in my opening post, even that is still a bit premature with no one having played half their slate yet, but it's something I've kept track of. And yes, there are a lot of teams with heavy imbalances towards home games, though a couple of the mid-major conferences are actually in the positive rankings with all the road trips so far.

At this point, I would expect a lot to change in the weekly rankings though with conference play really starting to pick up, but I'm here to chart any changes that do happen, and there are always a few. So below are the updated rankings factoring in the upcoming week's games. For reference, you can view last week's rankings here.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 5

We're onto Week 5 of the college football season, and we're definitely getting into the heart of conference play. With the number of byes from earlier on this season though, we're not into full-fledged conference play yet. But with the number of conference games going on this week, the weekly scores for conferences are going to be pretty small in general. On the plus side though, this means we're almost through all the cupcake scheduling.

If you want to see where we left off, you can view last week's rankings here. Like I've done so far this season, in parentheses you will see a pair of numbers: the first is the average score for the week of scheduling for a conference, and the second is for the conference's cumulative average over the course of the season. Here's where we stand with the upcoming weekend's games.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 4

Hard to believe it's already Week 4 of the NCAA season. Conference play is really starting to pick up this week, so this is probably the last in-depth post I'll have to detail things and I'll probably do express posts in the coming weeks. While it's definitely still way too early to start thinking about seeding playoff teams, it's something to keep in mind as we approach November.

If you want to see where we've been so far, you can view last week's rankings here. The rankings below will follow the same general format: rankings are based on a conference's cumulative average score over the four weeks. That's the second number in parentheses, following the average score for the week.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 3

September is now, for all intents and purposes, in full swing. We've played 2 weeks of college football (and 2 of high school here in Illinois) and one week of the NFL season. I'll have mine and Nathaniel's Week 2 picks for you tomorrow, but for now I'm back to the college ranks.

There's been some compelling games through 2 weeks, even in the midst of dozens of games against FCS competition. Yeah, I've been hard on those schools, and yes, I know the FCS schools like those games to see how they measure up against top tier competition and get a fancy paycheck for doing so, but I really don't think these games should count in the standings... especially when they get played at the end of the year. It's a scummy way to work your way up the rankings. If you're going to play these games, have them be a preseason affair a week before the regular season starts as a tuneup so they don't count in the standings, but fans can get their early fix in for football. The only issue then becomes player safety, which is another matter entirely. I stand by my criticisms.

So if you want a look at where we've been so far, you can view last week's rankings here. While I'm keeping up with the Road-Home Disparity Index, it's too early to post it, and it's also way too early for playoff points. As such, here's how the Non-Conference Schedule Strength metrics measure up by conference. In parentheses are the average scores for the week, followed by the total average score for the conference on the year. Rankings are based on total average score for the conference.

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 2

With NFL previews now finished, I'm back to the college scene. Last week saw some compelling games and great moments, while we also saw a few schools that I condemned for scheduling FCS teams lose to said FCS teams. To those schools: you deserve it. Pansies.

With that out of the way, we should move on to what's going on this week. I'm building up the Road-Home Disparity Index as the season goes on, but it's still too early to post those since that's an end of the season metric, as are playoff points (though I might do a partial count as we get closer to the end of the year and I start doing early playoff seedings). So for now, I'm stuck doing just nonconference scheduling rankings. If you want to see last week's, you can find them here. The numbers in parentheses show this week's average score for the conference first, then their total average for the season to date. Rankings are done based on the season average. Here are this week's scores:

2013 NCAA FBS Rankings: Week 1

Ah, it's good to be back and doing some number crunching. At least at its highest level, NCAA football begins tonight. There are only a handful of games though, with most of the action starting on Saturday. Nonetheless, I need to get started on crunching the numbers.

Earlier this week I highlighted the formulas I will be using this year, but of the three, I can really only use one of them at this stage. The Road-Home Disparity Index is best saved for the end of the year to account for any cancellations and what have you, and it's much too early to factor in Playoff Points. As such, we're going back to the Non Conference Schedule Strength. What I did in the early part of the season last year was rank each team's point total, but I didn't really release that information until later on when there was a decent sample size and I could start thinking about playoff seeds.

Instead for the first few weeks, I'm going to look at this by conference. Since these conferences range in size from as few as 7 teams to as many as 14, I need to give each conference's score as an average (rounded to the nearest hundreth of a point). I'm sure you'll see a theme pretty early on. So without further ado, here's the initial rankings based on the opening week:

1. Mountain West (1.58). San Diego State, San Jose State and Air Force all scheduled FCS teams, but this is more than offset by 5 teams going to power conference schools. Others get tough opponents or go on the road. Strong starting schedule (which of course will somewhat penalize the tougher conferences, but not too badly).
2. MAC (1.53). Having an extra team compared to the Mountain West doesn't really help when it comes to computing averages, (the sum score for the MAC was 1 point higher) but average is more fair. Kent State, Ball State and Eastern Michigan all face FCS squads, but 6 MAC schools go on the road to face BCS opponents.
3. Conference USA (1.42). Middle Tennessee moved conferences, but they still host a D-IAA opponent, as will Tulsa. This was offset by 4 trips to "big-time" schools. Their sum score actually matched the MAC's as well, but having 14 schools will lower the average.
4. Big Ten (1.17). The highest of the BCS conferences, this is helped by having only a couple schools hosting weak opponents (granted, it's Illinois and Indiana, but still). Northwestern, Penn State and Purdue all travel to face BCS opponents from another conference. (Random aside/possible additional unprovoked shot at the U of I: ESPN Chicago producer Adam Abdalla, who I used to intern for a few years back, came up with a great hash tag for Illini football. Use at your leisure.)
5. SEC (1.14). Part of me was a little surprised they were this high, but we have to remember last year that these guys, for being so "elite" backloaded their schedules with cupcakes (I think as a ploy to cheat the already corrupt BCS). Missouri and Tennessee are the only transgressors this week, countered by Mississippi State and Georgia visiting other BCS schools. Alabama and LSU play neutral site games against other power conference schools, and Krntucky also has a neutral game. South Carolina and Auburn host schools from those conferences too. Not bad.
6. Sun Belt (1.00). Then there's these guys, who have 3 teams (South Alabama, Georgia State, Arkansas State) playing FCS schools, with only 2 teams hitting the road to face BCS opponents. It's enough to average out as each team hosting another FBS school, but still.
7. Pac-12 (0.83). Oregon, Oregon State and Arizona get punished for facing those smaller schools, and this score does get dragged down due to byes by Arizona State and Stanford. California and Arizona State do get kudos though for starting their schedules on the road at BCS opponents.
8. American Athletic (0.7). The former Big East doesn't start too well, with Connecticut, Houston and South Florida pigging out. Memphis is off, and the rest of the conference isn't helped by the lack of big time opponents (though Rutgers and Temple do have decent trips scheduled).
9. ACC (0.64). North Carolina visiting South Carolina is the only thing keeping the ACC really afloat this week. If it weren't also for Clemson hosting Georgia and Virginia Tech's game against Alabama, they'd be really screwed. Boston College, Wake Forest, Duke and Georgia Tech have FCS teams lined up this weekend.
10. Big 12 (0.4). TCU's neutral site game against LSU helps, as does Oklahoma State hosting Mississippi State, but Baylor, Iowa State, West Virginia and Kansas State all host FCS teams. The Kansas State one is hard, seeing as they're playing defending champion North Dakota State, but I have to stick to my guns on this. (This is more of an attack on KSU than a diss of NDSU, I have family up there!)

Next week I'll include a weekly score as well as an overall score through two weeks of scheduling stuff. It'll still be too early to even really look at Playoff Points or RHDI though, so it'll still just be this metric.

2013 NCAA Football Season: New Year, New Formulas, Same Old Playoff Griping

For much of this calendar year I haven't been able to do a lot of writing for COAS (NBA Tournament of Champions aside), and I feel bad about it sometimes, but unfortunately other things take priority. However, as we approach football season and one final year of a piece of crap system, I'm back at calculating how the FBS should really run its postseason.

Last year's run was a pretty fun one, and I kind of enjoyed really following a season for the first time to really try to get a better idea of who to put in a 16 team playoff. It may not have been perfect, but I'm sure people enjoyed it more than the 42-13 drubbing Notre Dame received at the hands of Alabama (you know, unless you're a Bama die hard or Notre Dame hater; I don't fall in either category). The handful of upsets in the tournament made for a little drama, while still not invalidating the regular season.

So with a full season under my belt, I wanted to take things up a notch in terms of formulas, just to give myself a little more information to work with when it comes time to decide at-large teams and seed the field. (Also, it allows me to judge poor scheduling habits that will hopefully start working their way out of the system next year when we actually do get a playoff.) Returning from last year is my Non-Conference Schedule Strength metric, which I use to try to measure how well a team schedules its out of conference slate. For each week, teams receive a score based on how well they schedule. The formula basically goes like this:

• -1 point for facing an FCS team (last year, I penalized UTSA with a -2 a couple times for holding onto old D-II matchups)
• 0 points for a bye week or conference game
• 1 point for hosting an FBS team not in a "BCS Conference" (As much as I harp on equality, almost every year your champion will come out of a power conference barring some crazy voodoo magic happening, hence the favoritism)
• 2 points for going on the road to face an FBS team not in a "BCS Conference"* OR hosting an FBS team in a "BCS Conference"
• 3 points for going on the road AND facing a team in a "BCS Conference"*

Note: The "BCS Conferences" are defined as the ACC, American Athletic, Big 10, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC.

Obviously independents are going to have a much higher NCSS than everyone else, but this provides a pretty good indicator of how well they're scheduling overall. (This is also why I didn't include an independent average in my weekly rankings.) Inherently it also benefits the "non-BCS conferences" since they tend to go on the road to face more big time opponents, though really it's an indicator that for all the talk from BCS conferences about how "Oh, our schedules are the toughest, you guys don't play anybody!" is something of a lie since their non-conference schedules weren't really up to par.

I need to go beyond that though. Last year a lot of decisions on at-large teams were pretty subjective based on quality of losses, so I found a much more objective system that, while not perfect, should help alleviate some of those problems. The IHSA uses "Playoff Points" in the construction of its football playoffs, and it's an easy enough system to translate over that I'm going to use it here. Basically, at the end of the season, the total number of wins by teams you beat counts as your "Playoff Points". I'm not counting wins against FCS teams in this system, but everything else will. If a team plays in a mediocre conference, this score might get inflated a little bit, but beating a really good team will help balance this out.

Finally, I'm also going to condemn a major scheduling disparity by including what I call the "Road-Home Disparity Index". What I noticed really looking at schedules last year is that most, if not all, FBS teams play an unbalanced schedule in terms of home and road games, with a ton of games coming at home. This is great for you gate receipts and all, but for the sake of competition, this is not ideal. For its upcoming season, my alma mater North Central College has a 10 game slate (they're D-III) consisting of 5 home games and 5 road games. Granted, 4 of the 5 are in-conference, but the athletic administration did a good job of making sure that the non-conference schedule balances it out. Going back as far as 2008, 2011 is the only time North Central played an unbalanced schedule (and also faced an NAIA team at home... shame, though it hasn't happened since thankfully.)

For this formula, I'm going to tally up the number of home, road and neutral site games played during the regular season (conference championships don't count since those are merit-based). From there, I'm going to subtract the number of home games from the number of road games and halve the difference. I won't count neutral site games against either team that plays out of fairness to both. For example, taking Alabama's 2012 schedule would give 7 home games, 4 road games, and 1 neutral site game. Taking the 4 road games and subtracting their 7 home dates gives us -3, which results in a final RHDI of -1.5. I would guess most teams will be in the -1 to -1.5 range. I will probably look more favorably on teams closer to zero, though this, like the other formulas, will not be an end-all, be-all factor in awarding bids or seeds.

Hopefully this regular season will have just as many interesting storylines as last year's did, and hopefully we can see some great matchups set up for another fun playoff! It works at the lower levels; why can't it work at the highest level of college football? I'll start crunching numbers on a weekly basis beginning later this week, since Thursday marks the beginning of this season.