Yearly Archives: 2014

Rating the 2014 Non-Conference Slate: ACC

First and sporting some pretty beefy schedules, at least the top end, is the ACC.

  1. Florida State (3 legit, 1 FCS): N-Oklahoma State, Citadel, Notre Dame, Florida. This is a pretty strong contender for one of the best schedules in the country. Yes, the meet with the Gators is a rivalry game, but nonetheless there’s two class opponents in Oklahoma State and Notre Dame.
  2. Clemson (2, 1): @Georgia, South Carolina State, Georgia State, South Carolina. Clemson visits Athens for the second part of their series. The 38-35 win last year set the tone for the Tigers’ season, riding a 6 game winning streak until getting dismantled by FSU.
  3. Miami (1.25, 1): Florida Agricultural and Mechanical, Arkansas State, @Nebraska, Cincinnati. Miami-Nebraska is the best kind of non-conference game, the intersectional meeting between two teams who don’t play each other often. Their last meeting the 2002 Rose Bowl, which the ‘Canes won easily. As national powers in the 80’s and 90’s, they met in four different Orange Bowls, with Miami winning three. The last regular season meeting was in 1976. As for the rest of the schedule, it’s pretty standard, though there is that throw-in with former Big East foe Cincinnati.
  4. Virginia Tech (1, 1): William & Mary, @Ohio State, East Carolina, Western Michigan. VPI finds itself playing a potential national title contender again, but I’ll give them kudos for scheduling those kinds of games at least.
  5. North Carolina (1, 1): Liberty, San Diego State, @East Carolina, @Notre Dame. I saved it for this one, but East Carolina is a bit of a trendy pick to be a really good non-power conference team this season, and definitely the sort of team that could make this year’s UNC team like every other year’s UNC team: overrated. There’s also a game at South Bend for good measure.
  6. Boston College (1, 1): @Massachusetts, Southern California, Maine, Colorado State. BC will play UMass in a huge NFL stadium and then play Southern Cal in their much cozier home. (UMass, for their part, will be re-opening their on-campus stadium a few weeks later.)
  7. Virginia (1, 1): California-Los Angeles, Richmond, @Brigham Young, Kent State. Somehow I doubt Virginia will have the same luck against BYU this year as they did last year. Then again, they may need luck just to get past Richmond and Kent State.
  8. Syracuse (1, 1): Villanova, @Central Michigan, Maryland, N-Notre Dame. The ‘Cuse already managed to get former ACC member Maryland on the schedule, which is somewhat impressive. The neutral site for the Notre Dame game is MetLife Stadium. I’m going to guess there’ll be a lot of blue and gold in the stands that day.
  9. Louisville (1, 1): Murray State, @Florida International, @Notre Dame, Kentucky. I know that Notre Dame has a “scheduling agreement” with the ACC now, but geez. This schedule also goes near the bottom for a “wtf?” road game at FIU and the fact that I tend to discount yearly rivalry games a bit.
  10. Georgia Tech (1, 1.5): Wofford, @Tulane, Georgia Southern, @Georgia. Our road game at Tulane, meanwhile, is to open up the return of football at Tulane for the first time since 1975. Other than that, there’s not much else to recommend this schedule. The half-FCS point is for Georgia Southern, which is a transitional team this year.
  11. Pittsburgh (0.5, 1): Delaware, @Florida International, Iowa, Akron. FIU managed to score eight home games this year, which is really good for a team like them. That’s probably one way to line up your 2-for-1 and 3-for-1 deals, but if I were a mid-major AD I’d probably shoot for spreading the wealth a little bit, you know?
  12. Duke (0, 1): Elon, @Troy, Kansas, Tulane. Speaking of called in return games, Duke will venture to Troy. We’ll quickly get an idea if the Blue Devils are working their magic again this year, it seems.
  13. Wake Forest (0, 1): @Louisiana-Monroe, Gardner-Webb, @Utah State, Army. Okay, what the heck? Is the ACC going on on a barnstorming tour this year?
  14. North Carolina State (0, 2): Georgia Southern, Old Dominion, @South Florida, Presbyterian. This might be one of the worst schedules in the country, with two transitional teams, an additional full FCS team for good measure, oh yeah, and then a road game.

So pretty good at the top, but pretty atrocious at the bottom. What do the other conferences have in store for us? Tune in next time for the Big Ten.

Rating the 2014 Non-Conference Slate: Prologue

It’s that time again! We’re less than a week away from the start of the season, so let’s kick it off with our annual take on pre-season previews: a ranking of every major team’s out-of-conference schedule.

Continuing from last year, we are now only ranking the “Power 5” conferences: the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC. The only non-Power 5 teams with ratings were Cincinnati (0.25), Notre Dame (1), BYU (0.25), and Boise State (0.5).

What’s that rating, you ask? That’s our basically subjective “legit” appeal rating, essentially we’re trying to capture how excited a theoretical school might be about playing another school. The rating is a number between 0 and 1, with increments in 0.25.

Last year we gave out a stingy 15 “1” ratings. We apparently felt more generous this time around and gave out 22 “1” ratings. The following schools received a “1”: Clemson, Florida State, Miami, Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Michigan, Michigan State, Nebraska, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Oregon, Stanford, Southern California, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana State, South Carolina, and Texas Agricultural and Mechanical. For those scoring at home, that’s 3 for the ACC, 4 for the Big 12, 4 for the Big Ten, 3 for the Pac-12, and 7 for the SEC.

Given that, the average rating for each conference probably won’t be a huge surprise:

  1. SEC (0.661)
  2. Big 12 (0.639)
  3. Pac-12 (0.521)
  4. Big Ten (0.464)
  5. ACC (0.482)

 So that’s that. Next up: the ACC.

What Does It Take to Advance At the World Cup?

Five points.

Since the current 32-team format was implemented for the 1998 World Cup, five points is dividing line between advancement and disappointment.

Some background: before the 1994 World Cup, two points were awarded for a win and one point for a draw. What happened? Well, the 1990 World Cup was basically the soccer equivalent of the 1968 baseball season: defenses were dominant and no one felt super inclined to score. To try to encourage more goals, the value for a win was increased to three points for 1994.

Since the tournament still had 24-teams in 1994, I decided to simply look at the data going back to 1998. Here are the results:

Adv % Did Not % Total
0 0 0% 10 100% 10
1 0 0% 18 100% 18
2 0 0% 7 100% 7
3 1 5.56% 17 94.44% 18
4 11 47.83% 12 52.17% 23
5 15 100% 0 0% 15
6 11 100% 0 0% 11
7 16 100% 0 0% 15
9 10 100% 0 0% 10

So the takeaway is obvious: get five and you’re golden. Of course, that still requires going undefeated. Four points is basically a gamble, especially since that’s also the only score that has come down to goal differential.

You might be wondering: who the heck got three points and advanced? Chile in 1998. After drawing all three of their group stage games, they got demolished by Brazil 4-1 in the first knockout stage.

And finally, I was going to do a full day-by-day schedule run-down for various time zones, but there’s already a better-designed website doing that for me. The only thing really lacking is TV info, but at least in the US you have a one-in-three chance of getting that right anyway (ESPN, ESPN2, or ABC).

On SEC Scheduling

In the news once again is SEC scheduling, as the conference voted to remain with 8 conference games and permanent cross-division rivalries.

As a guy who does a yearly round-up of out-of-conference football schedules, I’m certainly a fan of the conference suggesting/requiring teams to schedule one strong out-of-conference opponent. (Of course, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina already comply.) It probably won’t help bring back Texas A&M-Texas or anything, but Kansas sucks enough that we’ll probably get Kansas-Missouri back at least.

The main problem, though, is the the permanent cross-division rivalries. The issue, as pointed out by Bill Callahan and others two years ago, is that most of the cross-division permanently rivalries aren’t especially interesting in and of themselves.

Right now, the matchups are:

West East
Alabama Tennessee
Auburn Georgia
Arkansas Missouri
LSU Florida
Mississippi Vanderbilt
Mississippi State Kentucky
Texas A&M South Carolina 

This is pretty much nonsensical. I would argue only two of these games are interesting from a historical perspective.

Instead, I have a much more radical proposal: realign the divisions.

Texas A&M and Mizzou were put into the divisions they wound up in out of convenience to fit the existing schedule. If the powers-that-be were actually at a point were they were willing to blow it up, why not go even further? It’s not really even that bad, actually. Here’s my proposal:

West East
Arkansas Alabama
Kentucky Auburn
Louisiana State Florida
Mississippi Georgia
Mississippi State South Carolina
Missouri Tennessee
Texas A&M Vanderbilt

Essentially, Alabama and Auburn would move to the SEC East and Missouri and Kentucky would move to the West. These divisions eliminate the need for cross-division rivalries, which means that that every year each team plays one home game and one away game with the opposite division.

I guess the only downside is that Kentucky is geographically east of Nashville, but that’s not nearly as bad as Missouri being the furthest west member of the SEC East. Also, this only affects football, so I doubt too many feathers would be ruffled up in Lexington.

Otherwise, all natural and historic rivalries are preserved (well, depending on how you feel about Kentucky versus Vandy and Tennessee). One might argue that this makes the East too strong, but that’s such a fleeting thing. The other argument I could see that all the history is in the East, after all, 6 of the teams in the East were original SEC members (as opposed to 4 in the West), but that’s sort of the point since the idea was to preserve Alabama-Tennessee and Auburn-Georgia.

At any rate, I can only assume this hasn’t happened yet because it makes too much sense.

Bowl Games 2013: The Last Part

As usual, all times Eastern and all predictions wrong.

Monday, January 6
8:30: Florida State vs. Auburn (BCS Championship Game @ Pasadena, CA; ESPN): Both of these teams actually have pretty solid defenses (especially FSU), but it’s really hard to see how offense won’t prevail here. (Then again, FSU’s defense did shut down Clemson, easily the best offense their defense faced all year.) I’m predicting a high-scoring shootout where the last team with the ball probably wins. In this scenario, a defensive stop or two will probably decide the game, so I guess I’m basically betting on FSU getting that stop. There’s also a bit of a temptation to point out that FSU pretty much went out and won all their games, while Auburn is two fluke plays away from being in the Outback Bowl or something. But hey, there’s always got be a lot of luck involved in the course of winning a championship based on one game.
Previous meetings: Likely thanks to FSU’s history as an independent patsy (remember: football in the state of Florida basically didn’t exist until 1980 or so), these teams have met 18 times. The first was in 1954, a 33-0 Auburn win. The two teams met regularly until 1963, with FSU earning their best result in that era with a 14-14 tie in 1962. The series resumed again in 1972, being played nearly every other year until 1990 (after which FSU joined the ACC). Florida State’s first win in the series wasn’t until 1977, when they won 24-3. They would only win three more times, in 1987 and 1989 twice due to a meeting in the Sugar Bowl. Auburn won the last meeting in 19980, 20-17. Overall, Auburn leads the series 13-4-1.
Last bowl game: Florida State owns the nation’s longest bowl streak, and it really isn’t even close. This is their 32nd straight bowl game (compared to Virginia Tech’s 21st). The streak dates back roughly to FSU’s ascendance as a national power, but they lost the first game in the streak 24-7 in the 1979/80 Orange bowl to Oklahoma. (FSU went 8-3 in 1978 but didn’t get a bowl bid, if they had, the streak would actually be 34 games since they made a bowl in 1977. Of course, things were different back then and FSU didn’t really beat anyone that year.) FSU beat Northern Illinois 31-10 in last season’s Orange Bowl. Auburn, as you probably know by now, went 3-9 last year and didn’t go to a bowl, so their last bowl game was the 2011 Chick-fil-A Bowl, a 43-24 win over Virginia.
Announcers: Brent Musberger and Kirk Herbstreit. Don’t forget, though, that ESPN is doing a “megacast” of the game, with alternate presentations available on the entire ESPN family of networks. I’m personally interested in the hopefully more tactically oriented broadcast on ESPN2.