WVU fall = Win for Big East?
NCAA Football Blog Headlines
While undefeated Penn State is staking its claim to a BCS National Championship berth, Rivals.com’s Tom Dienhart cautions football fans and voters tosteer clear of the Nittany Lions .
It’s foolish to think a Big Ten team has any business on college football’s biggest stage. But the No. 3 Nittany Lions now are poised to play for the championship in Miami. After being off next week, they travel to Iowa, then play host to Indiana and Michigan State. A 12-0 regular-season record is well within reach.
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But this team – and this conference – doesn’t deserve another chance at college football’s biggest prize. Besides, Paterno is used to fashioning an unbeaten team, then getting left out of the championship party. That has happened four times: 1968, 1969, 1973 and 1994.
So, please, don’t give us Penn State on Jan. 8, 2009, in Dolphin Stadium. Give us life, give us liberty, give us hope for a good game. That means give us Texas, Florida, Alabama, Georgia or USC. Heck, we’ll even take Texas Tech and its diabolical offense and kooky coach. They all have been more impressive than and likely would beat any Big Ten team.
Even a perfect Penn State.
Then again… this is from the same college football genius whoforgot that there are 11 teams in the Big 10 , so….
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Comment on Dienhart: Penn State is not worthy…
As promised/threatened the first BCS standings come with a series on conference comparisons.
This episode will explore the criterion used by the BCS. Next will feature OOC record and OOC strength, adjusted to account for biasing related to the central limit theorem. Consideration of records vs BCS teams, teams with winning records and opponents currently in the BCS top 25 will be examined as well. Finally a ranking using breaks in a collection of computer rankings will be used to separate teams into grades and each conference will be judged by their performance against each grade.
This process will be repeated at after the bowls are played and include bowl information and stats related to bowl wins, 10 win teams and data spanning 4 years.
Two of the factors used by the BCS are listed with theBCS standings . The third is harder to pin down because it is vaguely described. Some measure of the top to bottom strength of the conferences using the BCS computers is used to judge them.
Each BCS computer generates a conference standing, though one uses a different set of data to do so. Each presents their data as a raw data score and do not directly relate to each other in any meaningful way. By finding the mean and standard deviation for each computer a z-score can be obtained for each conference relative to that computer.
The average of these 6 z-scores is presented here:
SEC: 1.138
Big 12: 1.127
ACC: 0.804
Big 10: 0.776
Big East: 0.328
PAC 10: 0.277
MWC: 0.122
WAC: -0.605
MAC: -1.127
C-USA: -1.235
Sun Belt: -1.605
At the end of last yearsimilar results were obtained but the WAC was in the lower group and the MWC was in the gap, close to 0. The PAC 10 and C-USA down significantly from previous years. The Big 12, ACC and MWC are up from their typical position.
So while the SEC and Big 12 are neck and neck for the top conference in the land, and the Sun Belt is in no danger of their basement status, the MWC is doing well on a relative basis and the ACC is muddling along without a clear cut leader, but few liabilities either. I don’t expect to see anything different in the other data.
At this time I would like to plug my favorite, based on its theory and openness of methodology, of theBCS comptuer rankings . Unfortunately it also has my team the lowest of any of the computers.
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Comment on How do the conferences rate for 2008? – BCS Computers…
Tradition. Sometimes it is hard to argue against it. Ian Hummer of Washington D.C. powerhouse Gonzaga committed to Princeton on Monday, following in the footsteps of his father and uncle
