Who's Afraid of the SEC?: 2008 Preview

I'm not an SEC hater. I believe that at most times and in most places the SEC is better than all other conferences; better than the Big 10 and Pac 10 combined. But this year I have my doubts. Georgia, for one, is overrated. Florida didn't play defense. LSU has no quarterback and Auburn is installing a high school offense because the last one performed at that level (I'm exaggerating, but you get the point). I will need to be convinced that the likes of Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and Alabama are really better than Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Texas A&M, Colorado and Nebraska, because the top 4 in the Big 12 is every bit as good as the top 4 in the SEC. I'm not saying the SEC isn't better - I just need to be convinced this year.
The SEC championship, and possibly the BCS title, rest on two unknowns. Florida's offense will be record breaking, but its defense is a big question mark. Florida has talent on defense-Florida always has talent on defense-but last year they were exposed, abused, beaten and abandoned. The Gators lost two games in which they score 30 or more. Only Auburn held Tebow and Co. under 20.

Which brings us to the Auburn Tigers. One day the guy is trying to sell his offensive philosophy like a quack's magic tonic, the next Tony Franklin is heading up a national contender's offense. As long as Tommy is in town, Auburn will have a good defense, but what will become of the offense? If the Chick-fil-a bowl is a harbinger of things to come, Auburn could be really tough this year, or, if it isn't, Auburn's new up-tempo offense could just be another disaster that uses less clock before they punt or turn it over.
Auburn should slide into the championship game regardless, because LSU, the other West contender, has the schedule from hell. The Tigers from the Bayou have to travel to Auburn and Florida, and also have to play Georgia. Auburn gets Georgia and LSU at home and doesn't have to play Florida.
The SEC East could be decided in Jacksonville on Nov. 1 when Georgia and Florida meet up, but Florida will first need to win at Tennessee and at home against LSU. If so, and if Georgia plays up to some hefty expectations, we could be looking at a game for the ages. Florida will win if they play some defense and should be headed to the conference championship game matching a great offense against a great defense in Auburn.

And what a game that will be. When Florida has the ball, the level of play will be as good as we've ever seen in college football. When Auburn has the ball, it could be a different story. Whoever wins that battle will be SEC champs and could possibly be heading to Miami to face the boys of Troy for a chance at the big pie.
P.S. I want readers to know that I am explicitly ignoring another program that, despite selling their souls for a football coach and super recruiting classes, is yet to achieve anything - and I hope that continues, so I can watch them lose to fourth-tier teams on ESPN over and over and over again.

ACC Atlantic Preview - Whither Goest Clemson?

The ACC is an interesting conference defined in large part by a cultural preference that developed hundreds of years ago. The East Coast is marked by a unique respect for private institutions of higher learning.
Private universities, by definition, are attended by snotty-nosed pansies who think they're athletic if they can row a boat (I'm kidding, mostly; I went to a private college myself). This is a hindrance on the conference and would be more of a hindrance if the East Coast produced as much football talent as the South (including Florida and Texas) or California. Private schools are generally smaller and cannot deploy the fans or resources requisite to build a quality football program (and, consequently, are good at basketball instead)-and that is why most of the ACC sucks at football.

Clemson has been the focal point of most of the hype this year in the ACC, in part because there isn't too much else going on in the ACC Atlantic. Wake Forest established themselves last year as a good program but not one that is going to consistently make BCS bowl appearances, a Ryan-less BC will be about as exciting as Olympic pommel horse, and Florida St. is still a couple years from re-arriving.

Here are my questions for the ACC Atlantic this season:

1) Is this the year for Clemson to finally claim its birth right as ACC champs?

2) Is it geographically possible to differentiate the Atlantic and Coastal regions?
(I'm not really going to try to answer this question, it just gives me a headache)

1) Clemson fans (and everyone else) should know exactly what to expect from this Clemson team after week three. Clemson hosts the mighty Wolfpack of NC State. The Tigers will win this game, but if they do not run for more than 100 yards, trouble awaits them - and here's why.
The ACC is a relatively weak conference except at one position, defensive line. Even the crappy teams in the ACC have monster D-lines. Clemson has a monster D-line, as will NC State. NC State has produced some front fours that the Packers would have been happy to trade for straight up, and this year they will field another whopper. Clemson, though, does not have a good O-line; they lost three starters from a unit that underperformed last year. That's a big problem if you want to be successful in the ACC.

Clemson folks has a couple of things going for them. One, barring linebacker and offensive line, they are better or as good as every other team in the conference at every other position. Two, they do not have to play projected Coastal frontrunners VT, Miami, and North Carolina. Unless NC State holds Clemson under 50 yards rushing and wins that game, these two advantages should be enough to get Clemson into the ACC championship game (even after they lose to Florida St.).

When they do finally have to play Virginia Tech to claim their first conference title since my birth (figuratively, not literally), that's when they'll hit the wall. VT, like NC State before them, should be able to play in the Clemson backfield, set up camp, start a fire, roast some marshmallows, make smores, sing camp songs, tell ghost stories, rip off CJ Spiller's head while tries to dance in the backfield, and take home the conference hardware. But if Clemson's O-line learns to block this year, expect good things from this Tiger streak.

Rectifying a Stupid Conclusion - Preseason Polls

Georgia is #1, but should we care?

This time of year, we often hear about preseason polls and, in response, we hear that preseason pollsters don't know much this early and so preseason polls are just entertainment. One might point out, for example, that only 10 times since the AP started preseason polling (1950) was the final #1 in the top spot before the season (17%) and, more condemning, 6 times the eventual national champion was not ranked in the AP preseason poll.

But to use these numbers to suggest that the preseason poll doesn't mean much is premature and, well, wrong. I used a simple logistic model and data from the AP Poll Archive and found that preseason rankings are more important than you might think.

First, a team in the top spot in the preseason is 29 times more likely to win the national championship than if they weren't in the top spot. To clarify, that doesn't mean that Georgia is 29 times more likely to take it all than USC, but that Georgia is 29 times more likely to win it all than the average college football team. But that shouldn't surprise anyone--of course the Dawgs have a better shot then, say, Wyoming.

But ranking matters even for those at the top. The top dog, no pun intended, is almost 5 times more likely to be #1 at the end of the season than the average ranked team, 2.6 times more likely to achieve that result than other time top 5 teams, and 1.5 times more likely than the #2 team to be on top at season's end. And for the statistically minded, those results are statistically significant.

Finally, I present the results for the most comprehensive model I have tried:

The important numbers for our purposes are the odds ratios, in red, that detail the probability of a team with a particular rank winning the national championship relative to the average unranked team. Teams that start off on top are 200 times more likely to win the national championship than teams that start off unranked, and teams that are #2 at the beginning are 133 times more likely to win it all than the unranked teams, etc.

In other words, preseason polls matter, and they matter a lot--the numbers presented here are large and significant. It's good to be #1.

ACC Coastal Preview 2008

I was really tempted to do only one analysis of the ACC instead of breaking it down by division because, 1) I really hate how the ACC has divided their conference—they’ve turned political gerrymandering into an art form, and 2) the ACC doesn’t warrant as much attention as the Big 12 and SEC and does not deserve more than the Pac 10 and Big 10. But I was won over after preparing previews of the teams in the Coastal division which, though not the best in football, will be interesting to watch.

Here are my questions for the Coastal:

1) Can anyone (Miami?) knock VT off its Coastal throne?
2) What can we expect from the Yellow Jackets?
3) When will the Coastal produce another national champion?

Miami last season was 5-7 last year and returned 4 starters on defense, the only unit last year that played at a collegiate level. If you take out the flukish Texas A&M game from last season, the offensive was about as productive as your local department of motor vehicles. And only 6 starters returned from that group. Does this spell doom and gloom for the half dozen die hard ‘Cane fans?

Enter Randy Shannon, who has shown that he excels at one aspect of being a college coach-recruiting.

If college recruiting classes were graded like NFL draft classes, where we look at both the total talent brought in and the ability of that talent to meet specific needs, Miami’s class would have to be tops in the nation.

Quarterback play was pitiful last season, but Shannon brings in Florida’s last two Mr. Floridas, both of whom have broken Tebow’s records from three years ago. And the improvement at quarterback may be upstaged by the fresh talent Miami will be running at linebacker and receiver.

But all this talent is laden with big, boldfaced, even italicized question marks. They are unproven at the college ranks, and, perhaps more condemning, Shannon and Co. are unproven at developing talent and fielding efficient offensive units.

Virginia Tech has also lost a lot of talent, but as with the Miami case, counting the number of returning starters is a waste unless you consider where those starters went and who is coming back in to replace them.

VT’s offense started to click at the end of last season for the first time—ever. The quarterbacking combo almost replicated the skills that had once been present in a single physical frame when Michael Vick had been a Hokie, and the results were stunning. But VT will be soft at running back and ACC teams will now be prepared for Taylor and Glennon.

Generally this team will not be as good as last year, and, if the Miami talent pans out, they could be seriously pushed to win the Coastal. Miami will especially benefit from a favorable conference schedule and a non-conference schedule that will help them get some rookie mistakes out of their system.

2) There’s a story of Barry Switzer, already a legendary coach, trying to be the “smart” coach. Having won championships out of the wishbone, Switzer looked to mix things up to match incoming talent, first with Dupree and then with Aikmen. Dupree was an epic flop and Aikmen lasted four games before suffering a boo-boo (rumor has it that Aikmen had a very low pain tolerance), and Switzer was forced to switch back to the wishbone for the rest of the season. The result was one of the most dominate offensive units in the history of college football and a national championship. (And Aikmen transfers to a school that throws the football and the rest is history).

What does this have to do with Paul Johnson and Georgia Tech? I’ll explain, but first I must digress.

As I read reviews and previews of Johnson’s first Yellow Jacket outfit, I think a lot people have a complete misunderstanding of the situation. They see the poor offensive performance at the T-Day, count the number of starters that transferred out, and fear that Johnson won’t be able to recruit ACC quality talent for the triple-option.

The truth is, if he could transfer his offense, personnel and all, from Navy and build a top caliber defense, Georgia Tech could be a power in the ACC. Paul Johnson needs two things to have success on offense—the right type of talent and execution. Because he needs a specific type of talent, he doesn’t need to try to pull the Staffords of the world from Georgia (although having a Moreno wouldn’t hurt). Because he doesn’t use a pro-style offense he doesn’t want to recruit pro-style talent that is only interested in playing in a pro-style offense.

Johnson will need at least one complete off-season (not just most of a spring) to get his players to execute. If this team hasn’t doubled its offensive efficiency by the end of the year, then call me Susie, but I warn you that the beginning could be rough. Then, he will need two years to pull in some talent, specifically quicker offensive linemen, more physical receivers, and depth at B or wing back. By 2010, Georgia Tech will be leading the ACC and in the top 5 nationally in rushing.

Until then, and beyond, the real key will be defense. Georgia Tech should be able to focus its real competitive recruiting on defense in a region of the country that produces defensive lineman galore. This year, in fact, Tech’s D-line will be as good as any in the country. With a traditional 4-3, athletes won’t need to worry about getting lost in a non-pro scheme. Georgia Tech could put a talented defense and a unique, executing offense on the field and really put some pressure on the top dogs in the ACC. But not yet.

So, what does this have to do with Barry Switzer? Execution, angles and mismatches can overcome big differences in talent. That OU team was still incredibly talented, but Switzer and Co. knew how to coach execution in the wishbone and thus had greater success after losing the greater talent. Paul Johnson knows how to get execution in the triple-option. We need not worry about passing quarterbacks transferring out or fear that he won’t be able to bring in top-notch talent. Georgia Tech is not much different than Navy except he can practice more, recruit defensive talent without worrying about Naval obligations, and he no longer works for the federal government.

Just ask Mike Leach—he too utilized a unique offense scheme and execution to build a competitive program out of a small, technical university.

And it’s just the ACC—the bottom half of the Coastal is made up of powerhouses Duke, North Carolina and NC State. I’d rather face them than Army and Notre Dame every year.

3) The Coastal is an interesting division because it is laden with talent and with more academically oriented institutions. Duke and Georgia Tech are both smaller, ritzier, smarty pants schools. North Carolina is larger, but is still a brain factory (and then a basketball factory) before a football program. And Virginia and Virginia Tech are not for a faint of gray matter. It is a testament to the qualities of Beamer that Miami does not dominate this division every year.

Virginia Tech has made runs at the Big Dance in the past, but as Florida State made too plain against a most talented Beamer squad in ‘99, VT is, and will probably always be, short of the football factories.

Personally, I’m rooting for Georgia Tech. I loved watching Navy for the last few years and to see the Yellow Jackets return to national prominence with a throwback offensive scheme and perfect execution would make me giddy like a little school girl. But I’m not holding my breath.

Miami could be a real challenger in two years. Recruiting will get a little tougher this next year when you can’t promise any high school kid with shoulder pads a starting position (just ask Zook and Illinois), but Miami Northwestern produces enough talent, and the pipeline is firmly enough established, that bringing in that year’s senior class every season might just be enough to win it all at the college level (and I’m only mildly exaggerating).

The Flex Tournament for College Football

I spelled out my position on a tournament in college football a couple of weeks ago, but college football fans seem to be rather stubborn and bullheaded, bound to their myopic misunderstandings and deaf to my omniscient wisdom. Consequently, even though the popularity of a tournament isn't new--big names and small have been calling for an infernal tournament in college football for over a quarter century now--I think we may be one big fiasco (like the Auburn, USC, and Oklahoma trifecta in '04) from seeing change imposed on us.

Facing that reality, I've tried to design the best possible tournament format to satisfy three requirements that are dear to my heart: 1) It must have fewer than 4 rounds. College kids (outside of Florida State) have to go to class some time. Three rounds could be wrapped up in 15 days from start to finish, but with each additional round the size of the field and the number of games to be played would increase exponentially (literally, not figuratively, the field and number of games increase exponentially). This capped the field at 8-I will actually limit it to 6 teams. 2) No fluke champions. A team has to have a legitimate claim at the title to make it into the field. This, in my mind, means they need to win their own conference as well have a good record against solid opposition. 3) Notre Dame gets no special treatment (the Irish are already getting a break in that they don't have to win their conference). I have nothing against the Domers, persay, but I also don't understand why a group of rich Catholics should get special treatment outside of the Vatican.

I developed a format that satisfies all of those requirements and called it, in very climatic fashion, the Rlex Tournament format.

Flex Tournament Specifications:

1) All undefeated teams that finish in the top 10 of the BCS rankings are automatically granted a spot in the flex tournament unless the number of qualified, undefeated teams exceeds 6, in which case the top 6 are admitted into the flex tournament.

This is rule is where I show some love to the undefeated non-BCS teams. In the last two years, Hawaii and Boise State would have been admitted on this rule while they otherwise would not have qualified. Call it "its not my fault the rest of my conference sucks" loophole (gold lettering).

2) Only conference champions are allowed to participate in the flex tournament.

Also known as the "Michigan, you should have taken care of business when you had the shot in '06" rule, or the "you gotta not get whipped by K-State before you get a shot at LSU (and further embarrass your conference)" rule. Seven teams since 2004 would have been eliminated on these grounds, Michigan, at #3, being the highest ranked (red).

3) Teams must meet some statistical standard which gives them a meaningful claim to the title.

For the example below I have used an 80% confidence interval. In other words, based on the results from the BCS poll, if we are less than 80% confident that a team is not the best team in the country than they are invited to participated in the flex tournament. Otherwise, they are qualified to be invited (conditional on rule #4) (green). The confidence is based on a p-value (in the far right column) calculated based on some standard deviations and such.

4) No more than six teams are invited to participate.

This rule would not have come into play in the last four years if we'd been using the Flex. I have added it because I believe the top two teams should only have to win at most two tournament games to be national champions and it dramatically increases the probability of us getting the more desirable 1 vs. 2 match-up

The beautiful part of it all is that the number of teams invited to participate will vary from year to year, so only those teams that played like champions all season get a chance to play for the national championship. The fields in 2006 and 2007 would have included 6 teams, but in 2005 we would have had only three teams still in the running at the end of the season. No '07-'08 Giants, no George Masons and no Fresno States.

Below I have laid out the results from the last four season and the hypothetical brackets for those seasons.

The People's Poll: Everyone Else's Top 25

Now that all the "pundits" of the blogosphere are taking their potshots at the Coach's top 25--some well-informed and others full of cliche's and misinformation--I now present the season's first People's Poll so we can examine our own choices.

The People's Poll is a representation of voting data from prediction markets (see here). I'm a big believer in the power of prediction markets as a tool for aggregating a massive amount of data into probabilities. I've used these probabilities to generate a ranking of the top 25.

And here's the beautiful part--if you disagree, you can cast your own vote at any major prediction market with college football options (e.g. Tradesports). Just buy the teams that should move up and sell short the teams that should drop down. And if you're right, you can make you, or your favorite charity, a little money.

This early in the season, the trading is still relatively low so plenty of winnings are available to the smart investor at the margins. You might, for example, think Notre Dame should not be at 18, that Kansas deserves better than 21, or that BYU belongs in the top 25. If so, you can place your reputation or petty cash on the line.

Good Luck.

WAC 2008 Preview

Last season was not a good one for the WAC. Sure, they sent a team to a BCS bowl, made tons of money, and got plenty of time on center stage. But the WAC in 2007 was not a strong conference. Four of the 9 teams spent time with negative trend-o-matic ratings and Utah St. consistently skimmed right above the surface. Even Hawaii spent most of the season below 30—the realm of the unranked and uninteresting. Only Boise St. was strong during conference play, but they too lost to Hawaii, which then allowed Hawaii to get embarrassed by Georgia. I have never seen a team realize so quickly that they could not win a football game.

Here is my big question for the WAC:

Will Boise St. return to dominance?

The Broncos have dominated the conference in years past and have proven themselves to have a legitimately good football program. But they also lost a conference game last season and lost at Washington—who, despite its PAC 10 affiliation was not a good team last year. Most frightening, though, the Broncos only beat Nevada on a metaphorical coin toss in overtime #4—at home.

The challenger this season is Fresno State. With nonconference games at Rutgers, at UCLA and Wisconsin at home, Fresno State football could be riding the divine grace bestowed on their baseball team to a top 10 ranking and BCS bowl birth. (Could someone explain why Wisconsin agreed to play Fresno State on the road?) Its not likely, but it is possible—I think it is almost as likely that Fresno State runs the table as that BYU will do the same.

Fresno State should beat Nevada at home, and if they do, the WAC could come down to a showdown of conference unbeatens on November 28 when they travel to Boise. Fresno State will then try to do the impossible—win a conference game on the Smurf turf—and they will probably fail.

But Fresno State is the future of the WAC because, if they have a decent coach, the sheer force of demographics will buoy their ship over everyone else’s. Hawaii can challenge because it has access to native, Samoan and Tongan talent and can, therefore, continue to field good teams if administered properly (BYU and Utah have been successful because of their access to this same talent base, but that is a theological, not geographic matter in these latter cases). Boise State and Nevada have limited potential and seem to be stretched to their maximum capacity now. So Boise State should return to the front of the pack this season, but their conference domination, I believe, is at an end.

Parity in College Football - Part II

A little less than a year ago I did a piece on parity in college football inspired by the pitiful performance on top 5 teams against unranked opponents. Looking at the amount of time teams have spent in the top ten, I found real parity in college football ended with the 50's and that, although more teams rotate up at the top now than in the 60's and 70's, those teams that do make it to the top are just as dominant as those from earlier decades.

Parity, of course, can be viewed from many angles, and here I now offer two new views. Using complete team ratings from 1950 to the present, I looked specifically at how much turnover and how much separation there is between teams.

I measure year-to-year turnover using correlation (Pearson's r). The measure compares two sets of numbers to see how consistent they are. In this case, I compare a teams' ratings in 1950 to the same teams' ratings in 1951 to see how much they changed. If they didn't change at all, the value is 1. If they completely flipped over, the value is -1. If they changed randomly, the value is 0. Consequently, a higher correlation means less turnover from year to year and, consequently, less parity in that time period.

The second measure of parity is the standard deviation. The standard deviation is a measure of the average distance from one team to another team. The values can range across the map, but, for our purposes, a higher standard deviation means more separation between teams and less parity.


The dotted lines through the middle are the mean, so if the solid line goes above the dotted line, that time period experienced below average parity (less turnover or greater separation).

Both measures tend to agree that college football is now seeing greater parity than in the early 1990's, and the turnover over the last few years is higher than ever. They also agree that parity was relatively low during the mid to late 80's.

There was little turnover between the mid 60's to mid 90's during which the separation between teams peaked during the late 60's. During the early 70's, a few dominant teams separated themselves from the pack but then were brought back to earth during the late 70's and early 80's, producing a big shift from a very high to a low standard deviation.

This type of parity, though, is not what commentators are usually interested in. They call upsets parity while these measures are able to consider shifts across the board and gives us a little insight about the competitiveness of games across the country. If these trends continue into this season, we could see more teams diving into the top 10 and interesting games, if not great teams, from week 1 to Pasadena.