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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1531179, 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 NINE (10/29-31) Temple lost to #9 Notre Dame 20-24 17 - 4 = 13 points North Carolina beat #23 Pittsburgh by 26-19 3 + 7 = 10 points Notre Dame beat #21 Temple 24-20 5 + 4 = 9 points Minnesota lost to #15 Michigan 26-29 11 - 3 = 8 points North Carolina St. lost to #3 Clemson 41-56 23-15 = 8 points Miami beat #22 Duke 30-27 4 + 3 = 7 points Maryland lost to #10 Iowa 15-31 16-15 = 1 point Comment: It was a very quiet week-end among the ranked teams. Notre Dame-Temple was the only confrontation between ranked teams. There were no shocking blow-outs or off-the-wall upsets. Seveal of the teams that earned points were earning their first points of the season. The standings below barely moved. SEASON TOTALS Alabama 110 points Michigan 101 points UCLA 66 points Florida 64 points Mississippi 61 points Utah 61 points Louisiana State 60 points Stanford 59 points Texas A&M 50 points Iowa 47 points Southern California 43 points Notre Dame 41 points Michigan State 40 points Arizona State 34 points Georgia Tech 34 points Oklahoma 33 points Brigham Young 32 points Utah State 31 points Tennessee 27 points Memphis 26 points Louisville 25 points Minnesota 25 points Texas 23 points Clemson 22 points Purdue 21 points Duke 20 points Kansas State 20 points Texas Tech 20 points Indiana 18 points Northern Illinois 18 points Oregon 18 points U of Miami 16 points California 15 points Northwestern 15 points Rutgers 15 points Washington 14 points Jacksonville State 13 points Temple 13 points Toledo 12 points Vanderbilt 12 points Arkansas 10 points Mississippi State 10 points North Carolina 10 points Virginia 10 points Kentucky 9 points North Carolina State 8 points Syracuse 8 points Virginia Tech 8 points Wake Forest 8 points Western Michigan 8 points Air Force 7 points Boston College 7 points Arizona 6 points Iowa State 6 points Wisconsin 6 points Maryland 5 points Ball State 4 points Central Michigan 4 points Southern Methodist 4 points Connecticut 1 point [/QUOTE]

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