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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1925737, 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 #8 (October 20-22, 2016) Auburn beat #17 Arkansas 56-3 62 points Alabama beat #6 Texas A&M 33-14 39 points Southern Methodist beat #11 Houston 38-16 37 points Penn State beat #2 Ohio State 24-21 27 points Louisiana State beat #23 Mississippi 38-21 20 points Brigham Young lost to #14 Boise State 27-28 11 points Iowa lost to #10 Wisconsin 9-17 8 points Texas A&M lost to #1 Alabama 14-33 6 points Purdue lost to #8 Nebraska 14-27 5 points Texas Tech lost to #16 Oklahoma 59-66 3 points Comments: Auburn’s ‘upset’ of Arkansas was the second most impressive performance of the season after Louisville’s 63-20 demotion of then #2 Florida State in Week #3. An even bigger shocker was Southern Methodist getting 37 points from their win over fading Houston. They haven’t been relevant in 30 years. Is Penn State on their way back? Is LSU? Do they play any defense in the Big 12? I dunno…. SEASON STANDINGS Alabama 158 points Wisconsin 97 points Auburn 93 points Louisville 82 points Texas A&M 77 points Mississippi 76 points Ohio State 58 points Washington 57 points Florida State 43 points Virginia Tech 40 points Arkansas 38 points Southern Methodist 37 points Washington State 37 points California 35 points Houston 33 points North Carolina 33 points Clemson 29 points Penn State 27 points Indiana 26 points Navy 26 points Georgia 25 points Michigan 25 points South Alabama 24 points Syracuse 23 points Tennessee 23 points Oklahoma State 22 points Louisiana State 20 points Texas 20 points Troy 18 points North Carolina State 16 points Michigan State 15 points Nicholls State 15 points North Dakota State 15 points Oklahoma 14 points Brigham Young 11 points Georgia State 11 points Southern California 11 points Appalachian State 10 points Arizona 10 points Iowa State 10 points UCLA 10 points Duke 9 points Missouri 9 points Iowa 8 points Central Michigan 7 points Nebraska 7 points Colorado State 6 points Notre Dame 6 points South Carolina 6 points Tulsa 6 points Kansas State 5 points Purdue 5 points Colorado 4 points Mississippi State 3 points Texas Tech 3 points Florida 2 points Georgia Tech 2 points Miami 2 points Ohio University 2 points Wake Forest 1 point [/QUOTE]

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