2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 10 Seedings

You'd think before writing last week's seedings I'd look closer at upcoming matchups.

I mentioned the ACC title game being between Miami and Florida State, not bothering to notice that they were playing each other on Saturday. This does in fact bring us down to seven unbeatens left in big time college football. Odds are at least one of these will fall, if not more, but I'm kind of hoping they all win out just to cause a mess at the top.

So in the meantime, we've played 10 weeks of the college season, and we just have the month of November left to get through. Looking a bit at schedules, I can see why BCS proponents make the regular season argument, because there are some really compelling matchups left on the docket, though I still think those matchups would be enhanced with Wetzel, Peter, and Passan's playoff system.

I remain a one-man selection committee, but like the first two weeks of seedings, I'm not going in totally blind. To aid my selections, I've been crunching numbers and pulling other numbers from other sources. Next to each team I have their seed from the previous week and a few metrics. "NCSS" stands for "Non-Conference Schedule Strength", and tries to objectively capture how well a team schedules its non-conference slate. A higher score correlates to (but isn't perfectly indicative of) a tougher schedule. "PP" stands for playoff points, and is basically the win total of all the teams a school beat. (Note: a school's win total includes wins over FCS teams, but you don't get any playoff points for actually beating them). "SAG" and "FACT" are computer rankings done by people who either currently or used to do them for the BCS and either were kicked out for using margin of victory (for FACT, created by the late David Rothman) or still use margin of victory in another formula, but have a "politically correct" version they send to the BCS (for SAG, created by Jeff Sagarin; the Death to the BCS Playoffs use the "PREDICTOR" rankings after using other, less accurate Sagarin rankings the first couple weeks). As a reference as well, current conference "champions" are based on conference record if the season ended today, with the tie being broken by overall record.

If you want to see how last week's seeds fell, you can see those here. Below are this week's updated seedings.

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.