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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1161158, member: 289"] Again this year I’m going to keep track of how teams have done against ranked teams. And again I’ll remind the reader that this is not itself an attempt to rank teams, although I will have cumulative standings: it’s intended just as a stat to look at in determining where teams should rank. Also, as with all stats, the early results are hardly definitive but they will become more meaningful as the season progresses. Another issue is that I’m using a team’s ranking at the time the game is played, not their final ranking. When we played Northwestern last year, they were ranked 19th in the writer’s poll, (the one I use for this). They wound up 5-7 and unranked. Auburn, coming off a 3-9 season, was unranked. They wound up playing for the national title. But I’d have to wait to the end of the season to compute this using the final rankings, by which time no one would care about a breakdown of some of a team’s games. I’m trying to maintain a running tally of how teams are doing in their biggest games. Besides, a teams ranking at the time you played them may truly reflect how good the team was at that time. Northwestern played like a top ten team against us and went on to a 4-0 start before losing a series of close games. Auburn was not as great early in the season as they later became. Also I’m not making any allowances for home vs. road, (which I think affects the top teams less than the mediocre teams), or injured players, the impact of which is impossible to compute, (and top teams can usually replace guys). So here we go. I’ll stick to the writer’s poll for the rankings for consistency, (I need one #1 team, one #2 team, etc.) and because they have a poll each week from preseason to post season. The formula is pretty simple, although there are two parts to it. First you compute the “schedule points”. A team gets 25 points for playing the #1 ranked team, 24 points for playing the #2 ranked team, 23 points for playing the #3 ranked team, etc. down to getting 1 point for playing the #25 ranked team. Then you add or subtract to/from that the margin of victory or defeat. If they have any positive points left, I’ll record it here and add them up as the season goes along. I’m not going to record any net negatives or I would be documenting the season of Louisiana-Lafayette or somebody like that. That’s not what we are interested in here. We want to know about teams likely to wind up ranked and in consideration for the playoffs or the bowls. WEEK SEVEN MISSISSIPPI STATE beat #2 Auburn by 15 = 39 points GEORGIA beat #23 Missouri by 34 = 37 points MISSISSIPPI beat #15 Texas A&M by 15 = 27 points BAYLOR beat #9 Texas Christian by 3 = 20 points OREGON beat #8 UCLA by UCLA by 12 = 20 points ARKANSAS lost to #7 Alabama by 1 = 18 points SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA beat #10 Arizona by 2 = 18 points TEXAS CHRISTIAN lost to #5 Baylor by 3 = 18 points NORTH CAROLINA lost to #6 Notre Dame by 7 = 13 points DUKE beat #22 Georgia Tech by 6 = 10 points TEXAS lost to #11 Oklahoma by 5 = 10 points AUBURN lost to #3 Mississippi State by 15 = 8 points TEXAS A&M lost to #3 Mississippi by 15 = 8 points SYRACUSE lost to #1 Florida State by 18 = 7 points PURDUE lost to #8 Michigan State by 14 = 4 points KANSAS lost to #16 Oklahoma State by 7 = 3 points UCLA lost to @12 Oregon by 12 = 2 points Imagine, Mississippi and Mississippi State could be undefeated when they meet in oxford on November 29th. They might even be ranked #1-#2. And these are schools that have been also-rans for decades. I find myself rooting for school that were good when Syracuse was in the 50’s and 60’s and then faded when two platoon football came in. When those schools, (Army, Navy, Duke, Georgia Tech, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas Christian, Oregon State, etc), do well I know we can do well, too. Ole Miss was #2 to our #1 in 1959. In fact, they were the winningest team of the 50’s and 60’s: [url]http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin/records/calc-wp.pl?start=1950&end=1969&rpct=30&min=5&se=on&by=Win+Pct[/url] Still, State has the more impressive resume so far. They are really on a roll with three straight wins over top ten teams. They might be two Egg Bowls this year. The other one could be for the national championship. CUMULATIVE POINTS Mississippi St. 99 Georgia 91 Auburn 64 Mississippi 56 Texas A& M 49 UCLA 48 Texas Christian 44 Oregon 38 So. California 34 Arkansas 32 Virginia Tech 32 Arizona 31 West Virginia 24 Boston College 23 South Carolina 23 Stanford 23 Utah State 23 Texas 21 Baylor 20 Utah 20 Clemson 19 Oklahoma St. 19 Virginia 18 Washington St. 17 East Carolina 16 Louisiana St. 16 Michigan St. 16 Kansas St. 15 Northwestern 15 Notre Dame 15 Arizona State 14 Missouri 14 Indiana 12 North Carolina 13 Nebraska 11 Tennessee 11 Duke 10 Florida St. 10 NC State 10 Alabama 9 Syracuse 9 Wisconsin 9 Memphis 8 Navy 4 Purdue 4 Kansas 3 Washington 3 Florida 2 Iowa St. 2 San Diego St. 1 [/QUOTE]

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