College football "Manifest Destiny"

Interesting article about the future realignment of college football here. His realignment of teams into four 16 team conferences is similar to what I did. Except of course he cuts the 120 teams down to 64. Interesting cut format. He starts by talking all teams that averaged over 50,000 in home attendance. 46 teams made that cut. Then looking at teams with over 30,000 avg home attendance that added another 26 teams for the 18 spots. Several teams from current BCS conferences miss the final cut. Duke, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, Indiana and UConn are mentioned as omitted.

He makes no mention about what happens to the FBS tames that didn't make the 64 team cut. But one commenter made an interesting suggestion, treating it like a European Futbol league where the top non-qualifiers have a chance to replace the "worst" teams in the sweet 64 each season.

I like the concept - But I'd probably stick to six or eight 10 or 12 team conferences. so maybe 60-72 or 80-96 teams would make more sense to me.

New College Football Rules

If you watch the Forcier TD against ND, you notice that before he gets to the end zone he stretches the ball out. Some may think he is just trying to cross the plane of the goal. Or, maybe he was celebrating early. Is that against the new rules?

MIchigan Lacrosse

Who cares? It is a club sport.

The sine wave of Red Wings fandom

Wings beat Coyotes in game 7: Wings finally healthy beat Sharks in 5
Wings lose game 1 to Sharks: Sharks got lucky because of the quick turnaround - Wings in 5
Wings lose game 2: Now we're going back to the Joe, Wings in 6
Wings lose game 3: This is over, game 4 will be Lidstrom's last game, Howard is a bad goaltender...
Wings win 7-1 in game 4: Lookout, Wings are back, wings in 7...

I know all fans are by definition fanatic, but I think Wings fans take it beyond all other standards...

FBS realignment Follow up

I started here with a realignment of the 120 FBS college football teams into ten 12 team conferences. I wanted to look at the relative strengths of the proposed conferences. Here are the results based on one year of CFRC final standings:

Conference	Range	Mean	Median	Std Dv
Far West	20-113	61.67	57.00	28.21
Mountain	4-110	53.42	47.50	37.11
Plains	11-89	46.50	54.50	25.63
Rio Grande	3-117	69.92	71.50	41.66
Great Lakes	32-120	78.33	79.00	25.94
Ohio Valley	6-119	75.92	79.50	37.08
Gulf	14-111	72.58	88.00	34.97
South East	1-107	49.08	49.00	32.96
Mid Atl	8-82	44.08	39.50	24.32
NorthEast	10-104	53.50	41.50	31.61

Based on this data, Michigan's Great Lakes Conference was arguably the weakest last season - a case could also be made for the Ohio Valley and Gulf conferences. The Mid-Atlantic, NorthEast and SouthEast were the strongest.

I was curious if there is a built in bias towards BCS schools. The Mid Atlantic conference does have 11 BCS school out of the 12 (poor ECU) at the other end of the scale The Rio Grande and the Ohio Valley only have 4 BCS schools. The GL has a respectable 7 of 12 (counting Notre Dame).
I hope to follow these proposed conferences this season to see how they fair.