Rating the Non-Conference Slate 2008: Prologue

It’s almost that time again. I’d start, but the Big East and some other teams haven’t released their schedules yet so we can’t finish the rankings.

You may recall the series I did last year, where the rankings were almost completely arbitrary. This year, A5 and I went through and assigned each BCS team a ranking on a scale of 0.25-1, where 0.25 was the least desirable and 1 the most desirable. “Desirability”, of course, is still subjective, but generally our criteria were “would I look forward to playing this team?”, “how consistent has this team been in the past 5-6 years?”, and “how good was this team last year?” This means the rankings have a good mix of last year’s flashes in the pan (Mississippi State) and traditional powers that had bad years (Notre Dame).

Since we’ve already ranked all the teams, I can tell you which teams got 1’s and where each conference stands. So first, the teams: Boston College, Clemson, Virginia Tech, Nebraska, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia, Michigan, Ohio State, Wisconsin, Penn State, Notre Dame, Arizona State, California, Oregon, Southern Cal, Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee.

The conferences ranked as such:

  1. SEC (0.854 average)
  2. Big 12 (0.75)
  3. ACC (0.729)
  4. Big Ten (0.727)
  5. Pac-10 (0.725)
  6. Big East (0.656)

Is there some bias here? A little. But the main thing hurting the Pac-10 is that the bottom of the Pac-10 is pretty terrible: Washington State, Washington, Stanford, and Arizona got 0.5 or less, and so with 10 teams this affects their average a lot.

Anyway, once we have complete schedules we’ll start the whole series. Until next time!

2 thoughts on “Rating the Non-Conference Slate 2008: Prologue”

  1. Knute Bryant

    The SEC at the top? Lies I tell you! Lies.

    Really, they continue to put tough OOC games up and do well in them. It seems like this has to be cyclical and the SEC won’t continue to put up such good numbers against the rest of the country, but I don’t know if it’s any time soon.

  2. A5

    This post just gives the average weight for the teams in the conference if they were on someone else’s schedule, not the rankings of the schedules themselves. The more in-depth analysis will be coming up soon.

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