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 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 9 Seedings

One thing I will credit the current system for: they do do a pretty good job of creating some drama in the college football regular season. I still think more could be created with a playoff, since more games would have implications, but what do I know? I'm not a money-laden, easy-to-be-bought sheep who believes every lie the big conference commissioners spit out for a long time. Hold on, let me get off my soapbox.

A couple of the unbeatens fell from the pedestal this week, leaving us with only 8 teams at that mark through 9 weeks of football. Of these, amazingly only one is guaranteed to fall (and at the latest, that would be during the ACC title game between Florida State and Miami). Could you imagine if we have 7 undefeated teams at the end of the regular season? How much anger would that drum up against not only the current system, but even the "College Football Playoff" that will debut in 2014? If this year were the first year of that and those seven unbeatens held firm, you'd have to snub three teams. Obviously we know Kirk Herbstreit doesn't have a problem pissing off fan bases of schools from mid major conferences, but Fresno State's fan base would be upset too. On a bigger scale, you'd have to keep one of the following teams out: the winner of FSU/Miami, Baylor, Ohio State, Oregon, or Alabama. This is why 4 teams is not enough. Of course, knowing the way college football works, 4 of these teams will probably end up losing and we'd have to discuss the merits of their wins and losses, which is why we need a 16 team field. Give every conference champ a berth, add in at larges to fill the field, and let them play to decide who's the best. Isn't that the way football was meant to be?

But enough of my grandstanding. With Week 9's results taken into account, here's how I would seed the 16 team field if the season ended today. If you want to see last week's setup and a key to the acronyms next to each team, you can view it here.

Game Notes: Minnesota Wild @ Chicago Blackhawks (10/26/13)

Final Score

Wild 5, Blackhawks 3

Game Summary
A bit of an ugly game for the Blackhawks (6-2-3), who came out kind of flat in the early going. The Wild (6-3-3) never trailed, tallying the first goal midway through the opening frame. They scored early in the second to double the lead. A Hawk goal was taken away due to a high stick, but they came down and scored a couple minutes later. The Wild would get it right back and go up 3-1 after two. The Hawks never got closer in the third. Ultimately though, it was not a great night for Corey Crawford, who only stopped 80% of the shots he faced while Niklas Backstrom held off 33 of the 36 shots the Hawks threw at his net.

Three Stars

3. Ryan Suter (MIN). 2 A, 2 SOG, +1. One of Minnesota's high-priced acquisitions of the 2012 offseason notched a helper on Zach Parise's opening goal in the first, which was kind of a soft tally for Crow to let up. His second came in the 2nd period on the #1 star's first goal.
2. Niklas Backstrom (MIN). 33 SV, 3 GA, .917 SV%. Backstrom picked up his first win of the year, and didn't look bad doing so. He made some big stops to help keep the Hawks out of the net.
1. Jason Pominville (MIN), 2 G, 6 SOG, +2. Pominville ultimately had the game-winning goal in the third to, for all intents and purposes, put the game out of reach.

Final Thoughts

Not a great outing for the Hawks, back home off their Florida swing. It also drops my in-person record to 1-1 (the win coming last season against Nashville). It was really nice to get back to the Madhouse though. Jim Cornelison nailed the anthem as always (and I think it seemed louder than the first time, but that could be me). But the atmosphere was, of course, great. I just wish the outcome could have been as well. Going 1-7 on power plays just isn't going to get it done. Kane did have a nice goal on the one, but they just couldn't get enough done on Backstrom. On the other end, the Hawks were only listed as having 4 giveaways, but it sure seemed like more (probably because the giveaways promptly led to Wild goals). As it is though, it's a long season with plenty of games left. You'd like to have something from a game against a division foe, but the Hawks get them up in the Twin Cities on Monday, hopefully with a good chance to get some revenge for tonight's setback.

COAS/SSLYAR Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 8

Momentum is a fickle thing.

After one week of picking games, Nathaniel actually held a slim lead over me before I bounced back. At this point we've slowed down from our early success and are seeing some lower scoring weeks. Maybe we're thinking wrong about teams after seven weeks, maybe parity actually rules. Probably a little of both.

I saw Nathaniel for the first time in a while last week and the first thing he told me was, "You're kicking my ass in [Pigskin Pick 'Em]." Which is somewhat true; I hold an 8 game lead. But there are 10 weeks left, and plenty of time for me to fall off the table.

In Week 8, we disagree on 5 of the 13 games on the slate. As I was entering these, it seemed like we agreed on more than 8 games, but all the disagreements got clustered together. Might have been part of it. So at least for this week, my lead is safe. But how safe? Let's find out.

I'm Telling On You For Being Better!

Photographer unknown, from Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Life is often full of grey areas. Sports, to a degree, is an area that goes against this. In competitive leagues, only one thing ultimately matters: when the clock hits zero, which side's number is higher?

Whether I've developed credibility as a writer or not in the couple years since I started COAS or not, I did play competitive sports for a few years when I was younger. Those days are over, but the lessons they taught remain, and always will. And, like almost all athletes, the defeats my teams suffered taught us more than any victories ever did.

Between T-ball, basketball and soccer for the Fox Valley Park District, soccer and basketball for St. Paul's, and basketball for Aurora Christian, I played in a lot of games. My teams won our fair share, but we also lost plenty. And amongst those games were plenty of blowouts. I remember one season in Park District basketball where Nathaniel and I played together on a completely stacked team. We won our first two games by combined scores of 52-6 and 46-0 (how I remember these when I was like 10 at the time, I'll never know). And it's not like we kept the starters in the whole game. We had a 10-kid roster, and our coach rotated between two 5-man lineups over the course of the game. It's not like he was trying to run up the score; our team was just flat out better than everyone else.

I've been on the other side plenty of times too. My freshman year at Aurora Christian, I was one of about 10 or 11 guys. And we got our butts handed to us plenty of times. I remember in our first game we didn't score until midway through the third quarter. It was bad. But the other team didn't taunt us, and they did eventually call off the dogs and bring in the end of the bench. But we learned from it. Eventually, we got better as a team, and while we still weren't that great, we weren't that awful team that needed almost 20 minutes of game time to score.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, when I heard news coming out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area yesterday... I was offended.

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 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 8 Seedings

I've decided that for this year, this series of information needs its own set of posts.

If you've been reading COAS for most of the season, you've seen me update how well I think teams are scheduling their games. But you may also remember I alluded to a couple other formulas I was going to use. Looking through standings, with a lot of the unbeatens now fallen, I actually have few enough that I should be able to get them all in, and still fulfill the requirements to set up the field of 16 for the Death to the BCS Playoffs! And it's much less complicated then last year! Maybe that has something to do with the fact that this time, I know what I'm doing ahead of time.

So if you've never read Death to the BCS (and really, you should; it exposes all the flaws of the bowl system that we're switching from next season), it proposes a 16 team field made up of the conference champions (though we're down a conference from years past) and at large berths fill the bracket. The idea here is that elitism rampant in the power conferences gets tempered somewhat for the benefit of giving every team a legitimate shot at a championship by deciding it on the field, not in biased polls or algorithms. In an ideal world, I'd have a selection committee do this, but I'll make do with myself and a wealth of information. I also want to take into account a couple of the computer formulas. Jeff Sagarin, who does one of the computer rankings for the BCS, does a more correct version that accounts for margin of victory. The late David Rothman had a formula that used to be incorporated into the BCS until they took it out under claims of "sportsmanship". His formula is in the public domain, and those rankings can be found here. These are here to serve as something of a guideline to help confirm what my numbers and the "eye test" are giving me.

There's no exact method by which I'm seeding everyone; it's more of a "Take all the information available, and try to make an educated decision." So without further ado, here's the first set of playoff seedings. As a clue for what the abbrevations are, PP stands for "Playoff Points"; "NCSS" is the "Non Conference Schedule Strength", a school's score that gets averaged into the conference rankings I've been doing the past few weeks; "SAG" is Jeff Sagarin's "ELO_SCORE" on his webpage linked above which incorporates scores of games and is likely a more perfect system than mine; and "FACT" uses David Rothman's old formula.