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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 801291, member: 289"] One thing I always wonder about is: Who won the weekend? Which college football team gave the best performance? I decided to look at the question with this system: (1) List the AP top 25 teams going into the weekend; (2) Give each of them points in reverse order of their ranking: 25 for #1, 24 for #2, etc.; (3) Give their opponent that number of points; (4) add the number of points the opponent beat them by or (5) subtract the number of points the opponent lost by. The net result is the number of points the opponents gets for their performance that week. I will keep track only of positive points as I’m trying to measure positive accomplishments, not discredit teams for negative ones. In the first week, Clemson played the #5 team , Georgia. They get 21 points for that. The beat them by 3 to push it to 24 points. Georgia played Clemson, the #8 team. They got 18 points for that. They lost by 3 and wound up with 15 points. A good performance doesn’t necessarily mean you won. Washington took on #19 Boise State, which gives then 7 points to start with. They won by the shocking score of 38-6 and wound up with 39 points, giving them the most impressive performance of the weekend. Lowly Buffalo came back from a 0-23 first quarter deficit against #2 Ohio State to get within 20-30 and then had a fumble recovery in front of the Ohio State goal line negated by a dubious penalty. They wound up losing by 20 but got 4 points out of it. There are two obvious problems here: you only get points if you played a ranked opponent: Buffalo could get points this weekend for playing Ohio State but Alabama could get none for playing an unranked Virginia Tech team. But I’m trying to measure exactly that: how did teams do against ranked opponents? Alabama will play more ranked opponents than Buffalo this year and they will wind up with a lot more points. The other problem is that the ranking of a team will change over the course of a season. Southern California started out ranked #1 last year and were still #2 when we played them fairly close. They tumbled to 7-6 and were unranked by the end of the season. But teams can change through injuries, poor response to frustrating losses, chemistry problems, they don’t like the coach, etc. They may have been a more formidable team when they were ranked. But I’m not going to offer this as an alternative ranking of teams, just as a statistic to look at when deciding where to rank teams. Here are the teams that earned positive points this week for their performance under this system: Baylor beat #10 Oklahoma by 29 = 45 points Alabama beat #13 Louisiana State by 21 = 34 points Virginia Tech beat #11 Miami by 18 = 33 points Stanford beat #3 Oregon by 6 points = 29 points Kansas State beat #25 Texas Tech by 23 = 24 points Oregon lost to #5 Stanford by 6 = 15 points Pittsburgh beat #23 Notre Dame by 7 = 10 points Louisiana State lost to #1 Alabama by 21 = 4 points Utah lost to #22 Arizona State by 1 = 3 points Arizona lost to #19 UCLA by 5 = 2 points Mississippi State lost to #15 Texas A&M by 10 = 1 point CUMULATIVE TOTAL FOR SEASON Florida State 170 points Stanford 100 points Alabama 91 points Georgia 69 points Washington 60 points Missouri 58 points Louisiana State 54 points Wisconsin 51 points Arizona State 50 points Oregon 46 points Baylor 45 points Oklahoma 42 points Auburn 39 points Mississippi 37 points Utah 37 points Virginia Tech 33 points Central Florida 32 points Tennessee 32 points Brigham Young 30 points Ohio State 30 points Texas 30 points Oklahoma State 29 points Michigan State 28 points South Carolina 28 points Kansas State 26 points West Virginia 25 points Clemson 24 points Michigan 23 points UCLA 23 points Miami 21 points Texas A&M 18 points Vanderbilt 18 points Boston College 17 points Wake Forest 16 points Texas Christian 16 points Duke 15 points North Carolina 15 points Texas Tech 15 points Wisconsin 15 points Minnesota 13 points Iowa 12 points Northwestern 12 points Oregon State 12 points Akron 11 points Kentucky 11 points North Carolina State 11 points Penn State 11 points Pittsburgh 10 points Connecticut 8 points Army 7 points Notre Dame 7 points Florida 5 points Wyoming 5 points Arkansas 4 points Buffalo 4 points California 4 points Eastern Washington 4 points Maryland 4 points Rutgers 4 points Washington State 4 points Arizona 2 points Mississippi State 1 point [/QUOTE]

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