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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1899656, member: 289"] We often hear teams being evaluated at the end of the season by how they did “against ranked teams”. A couple of years ago I came up with a simple system for evaluating this, one with an acknowledged flaw but which nonetheless produced interesting results so I’ll do it again this year. The system is very simple. First I hand out points to teams based on the ranking of their opponent. If you play the #1 ranked team, you get 25 points for playing such a powerful team. You get 24 points for playing the #2 team, 23 for playing the #3 team, etc. I’ll call them schedule points. Here’s a chart to make it easy: 1-25, 2-24, 3-23, 4-22, 5-21, 6-20, 7-19, 8-18, 9-17, 10-16, 11-15, 12-14, 13-13, 14-12, 15-11, 16-10, 17-9, 18-8, 19-7, 20-6, 21-5, 22-4, 23-3, 24-2, 25-1. That’s step one. Now we play the games and see how these teams actually do on the field. What cued me into this is that most games will be won or lost by 25 points or less, so the points involved are comparable. You just compare the point differential to the points teams have gotten for playing a ranked opponent. If they beat the ranked opponent, their points will grow by the margin of victory. If they lose, you subtract the margin of victory from the schedule points. If that reduces them to zero or less, they get zero points. I’m not going to deal with minus points, just add up the positive points earned, or else my rankings would be cluttered up with a lot of inferior teams who were below the Mendoza line because they’d gotten blown out by their ranked opponents. If you play the #1 team and lose by 21 points, you’ll get 4 points: 25 schedule points minus the 21 points you lost by. If you play the #10 team and lose by 13 points, you’ll get three points. If you play the #15 team and lose by 14 points, you’ll get nothing, (11-14 = 0 in this system). I’ll record the points earned each week and how the teams got them and add them up over the course of the season. That will show us how each team did “against ranked teams”. Like all cumulative standings, they will sort themselves out as the season goes on and come more and more into focus. Later listings will be more meaningful than early ones as more and more teams get through the meat of their schedules. The cumulative listing should I think be less a ranking of teams than a statistic you look at in determining where to rank the teams. WEEK #5 (9/29-10/1/2016) Washington beat #7 Stanford 44-6 57 points Clemson beat #3 Louisville 42-36 29 points Michigan beat #8 Wisconsin 14-7 25 points South Alabama beat #19 San Diego State 24-42 24 points Oklahoma State beat #22 Texas 49-31 22 points North Carolina beat #12 Florida State 37-35 16 points Louisville beat #5 Clemson 36-42 15 points Wisconsin lost to #4 Michigan 7-14 15 points California beat #18 Utah 28-23 13 points Georgia lost to #11 Tennessee 31-34 12 points Indiana beat #17 Michigan State 24-21 12 points Oklahoma beat Texas Christian 52-46 11 points Iowa State lost to #13 Baylor 42-45 10 points South Carolina lost to #9 Texas A&M 13-24 6 points Tennessee beat #25 Georgia 34-31 4 points Comment: Washington’s crushing of Stanford was shocking but still got them 10 less points than Louisville got for their demolition of Florida State, still the best performance by any team this year. One anomaly of this system is that in a game between ranked teams, the winning team doesn’t necessarily get the most points out of it. We’ve all seen Tennessee beat Georgia on that Hail Mary and celebrate. That sure beats losing. But Tennessee was ranked #11 and Georgia #25, so the Bulldogs got 15 points for playing the Viols and the Vols only got 1 point for playing the ‘Dogs. The three point margin of victory increased Tennessee’s haul to 4 points and reduced Georgia’s to 12 points, but Georgia still got more points out of a game they lost – because they got credit for playing a much high ranked team close while the Vols, by their ranking should have beaten the Dogs by more than that. Similarly, losers Louisville and Wisconsin now move to the top of the standings: former #1 Mississippi didn’t play a ranked team and thus got no points. SEASON STANDINGS Louisville 82 points Wisconsin 80 points Mississippi 76 points Alabama 63 points Washington 57 points Texas A&M 47 points California 35 points Houston 33 points Ohio State 33 points Auburn 31 points Clemson 29 points Florida State 26 points Georgia 25 points Michigan 25 points South Alabama 24 points Tennessee 23 points Oklahoma State 22 points Texas 19 points Troy 18 points North Carolina 16 points Michigan State 15 points Nicholls State 15 points North Dakota State 15 points Arkansas 14 points Oklahoma 14 points Indiana 12 points Georgia State 11 points Appalachian State 10 points Arizona 10 points Iowa State 10 points UCLA 10 points Missouri 9 points Central Michigan 7 points Nebraska 7 points Notre Dame 6 points South Carolina 6 points Kansas State 5 points Colorado 4 points Mississippi State 3 points Florida 2 points Georgia Tech 2 points Ohio University 2 points Southern California 2 points [/QUOTE]

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