Big Ten Bowl Matchups (second edition)

Last year, I wrote a post to compare the Big Ten Teams and theirr bowl opponents to see what team should be expected to win, based on various indicators.  It was my attempt to head off the criticism of a bad bowl season for the conference, as I showed that based on the indicators a 2-5 would not be out of the question and 4-3 would be the best possible record.  Well, the conference ended up with 4-3.  Very impressive, really.

Well, this year, I decided to add some categories.  Here is a brief explanation of each:

-Conference Record:  Regular season conference record

-Position Conference Record:  This is the record each team would have if they lost to all teams above them in the standings and beat each team below them.  A tie would be 1/2 win and 1/2 loss.  In conferences with championship games, the winner of the championship game is 1st in the conference, the loser of the championship game is 2nd, and all other teams are listed based on conference record.

-Ranking:  This is the BCS ranking.  If neither team is ranked in the BCS, then it would be AP ranking, then USA Today ranking.  This would include receiving any votes.

-CFRC Ranking:  Self explanatory

-Head-to-Head / Common Opponents:  If the two teams played each other, what was the result?  If they didn't play each other, what was the result for any common opponents?  If the record against common opponents is the same, there are 'points' given based on point differential using this system (1-8 point difference = 1 point; 9-24 = 2 points; 25-48 = 3 points; 49+ = 4 points)

-Vegas Line: Self explanatory

So, here is what I found.

	OSU	Ark
Conf Record	7-1	6-2
Position Conf Record	9-1	8.5-2.5
Ranking (BCS)	6	8
CFRC	7	8
Common Opponents	x	x
Line	-3

	Wis	TCU
Conf Record	7-1	8-0
Position Conf Record	9-1	8-0
Ranking (BCS)	5	3
CFRC	9	3
Common Opponents	1-0 (+2)	1-0 (+3)
Line		-3

	MSU	Ala
Conf Record	7-1	5-3
Position Conf Record	9-1	7-4
Ranking (BCS)	9	16
CFRC	18	10
Common Opponents	1-0 (+1)	1-0 (+2)
Line		-10.5

	Iowa	Mo
Conf Record	4-4	6-2
Position Conf Record	7-3	8-3
Ranking (BCS)	x	12
CFRC	30	11
Common Opponents	1-0 (+2)	1-0 (+2)
Line		-1

	M	MSU
Conf Record	3-5	4-4
Position Conf Record	3.5-6.5	5.5-5.5
Ranking (BCS)	x	21
CFRC	43	23
Common Opponents	x	x
Line		-6

	PSU	FL
Conf Record	4-4	4-4
Position Conf Record	6-4	5.5-5.5
Ranking	x	x
CFRC	44	29
Common Opponents	0-1 (-2)	0-1 (-3)
Line		-7

	IL	Bay
Conf Record	4-4	4-4
Position Conf Record	6-4	6-5
Ranking (BCS)	x	x
CFRC	51	38
Common Opponents	x	x
Line		-1.5

	NU	TxTech
Conf Record	3-5	3-5
Position Conf Record	3.5-6.5	4-7
Ranking (BCS)	x	x
CFRC	63	37
Common Opponents	x	x
Line		-9.5

So...

Based on conference records, The Big Ten should go 2-3-3

Based on position conference records, The Big Ten should go 4-4

Based on rankings, The Big Ten should go 2-3-3

Based on CFRC rankings, The Big Ten should go 1-7

Based on Head-to-Head/Common Opponent, The Big Ten should go 1-2-5

Based on the line, The Big Ten should go 1-7

The average of the above is 2.75 wins, making a 3-5 record a good one.  

I think the most important category is the position conference records.  This minimizes the effects of a tie on the top of the conference (is MSU's 9-1 equivalent to 9-1 in another conference, for instance?) and accounts for the difference in conference sizes (4th place in a 12 team conference is not the same as 4th place in an 8 team conference, for instance).  In this category, 4-4 will be expected.  And that is certainly something to hope for, but the other categories are all below that, and some of them are probaby actually better predictors of what is going to happen.  And the Big Ten will be criticzed for being bad.  And the criticism appears to be somewhat valid if it doesn't pull out at least 3 wins. 

Full bowl roster??

There are 35 bowl games this year. That means there are 70 teams going to bowl games. Right now there are only 64 teams that are bowl eligible. I'll break the slots down by conference:

Conference	slots	eligible	potential
ACC	8	9	0
Big East	6	5	3
BigTen	8	8	0
Big12	8	8	1
C-USA	6	6	1
Ind	1	3	0
MAC	3	5	1
MWC	5	5	0
PAC10	6	3	4
SEC	9	8	2
SunBelt	2	0	5
WAC	4	4	2

The ACC meets its quota and will likely be sending a 9th team bowling.

The 3 Big East schools vying for the one guaranteed spot are Cincinnati, Louisville and Rutgers. Louisville is 5-6 and is ahead of Rutgers 28-0 as I write this, so things look good for them. That is bad news for 4-6 Rutgers. They need to beat Louisville and WVU next week to get to 6-6. Cincinnati is also 4-6 and need wins over UConn & Pitt. It seems likely that Louisville will become the final conference bowl eligible team today.

The Big Ten appears to meets its quota, but since it is likely 2 conference teams will make BCS bowls, the Little Caesar's Bowl will be looking for a non Big Ten team.

The Big 12 is one short of its quota with 5-6 Colorado playing Nebraska today trying to get eligible. The Buffs have played better since firing their coach, so this isn't as unlikely as it seemed a few weeks ago.

C-USA has filled its 6 slots. Houston (5-6) plays Texas Tech Saturday night to try to get an extra team in the mix.

All 3 Independents have reached eligibility. Navy is tied to the Poinsettia Bowl. ND still has some connection to the Big East bowls, but there are a lot of stipulations. Army has Navy left and is likely hoping for not enough automatic qualifiers to get a bid...

The MAC is already 2 over its guarantee and a win by 5-6 WMU over BGSU would make another potential bowl team.

MWC has 5 teams for its 5 slots. But it is likely TCU will move up into a BCS bowl, opening up a slot for an out-of-conference qualifier.

The Pacific Ten still needs two more teams to fill their quota. Cal (5-6) gets in if they beat Washington (4-6). UW needs to beat Cal and Wazoo in the Apple Cup to get to eligibility. Oregon State (5-5) needs wins over Stanford and Oregon. UCLA needs wins over Arizona State and USC. It looks to me like only one more team becomes eligible out of this group.

The SEC is looking for one more team. Georgia (5-6) needs to beat Ga Tech and Tennessee (5-6) needs a victory over Kentucky.

The SunBelt is crazy with no eligible teams right now. FIU (5-5) needs a win over Arkansas State or Middle TN State. Troy (5-5) needs to beat either WKU or FL-Atlantic. LA-Monroe (5-6) has to beat LA-Lafayette. FL-Atl needs to beat Troy as well as MTSU. That leaves MTSU needing victories over FL-Atl and FIU. Clear as a bell. What happens if none are eligible?

Dave's WAC has 4 teams eligible for its 4 slots. But Boise St will likely be BCSing. The two potential teams are La Tech (4-6), who needs wins over CSU-SJ and Nevada, and Idaho (5-6) who must beat Fresno St.

I think it will be very close to get to the 70 eligible teams. There will probably be only 3-4 eligible teams at home over the holidays...

cfrc

If anything disproves the usefulness of the cfrc, it should be this. I used the cfrc to make my picks for my family's bowl pool. This is a confidence pool, so the game most confident you give 34 points to the game you think is most a toss-up you give 1 point to.
Using the CFRC, I used the differences in the rankings between the two teams to determine the confidence point.
The biggest difference was between MSU and TTU so, I picked Tech with 34 points, all the way down to the BCS champ game where there was only a 1 rank difference between Alabama and Texas.
So far the CFRC has gotten the 33 point (Fresno and Wyoming), 32 point (Nevada and SMU), 28 point (WVU and FSU) and 24 point (Houston and USAFA) along with 11 others for an overall record of 11-14 and a point total of 215. This ranks 18th out of 28 in my family and 225,666th in all of espn (better than only 32.9% of the other entries)
This all points to the fact that too many rankings make too much noise in the system
In the jiMpossibleandsarcasMike pool - where I made my own picks I am 14-11 and in the 90th percentile! Obviously my rankings are better than the CFRC and I should be consulted when you are looking for the relative strengths of particular teams!

Happy New Year!

1st annual Jimpossible&sarcasMike Bowl pool

I created a Bowl Pool on ESPN.com for all the fans of our blog.

Here is the link to join

http://games.espn.go.com/bowlmania/en/group?groupID=32184

Group: Jimpossible&sarcasMike

Password: JiMike

Set your entry as a confidence pick to have a chance to win.

Good Luck!

Big Ten Bowl Matchups

So, we come to the time of the year that the Big T1e1n shows how bad it is. I decided to see if that is really true and compare where the B10 teams rank in their conference and how their opponents rank in theirs. I basically just took conference records as the indicator. For teams with conference championship games, I took the winner of the championship game as #1, the loser as #2

#1 OSU v Pac Ten #1 Oregon
tie

#2-3 PSU v SEC #3 LSU.
slight edge Big Ten

#2-3 IA v ACC #1 Ga Tech
opponent

#4-5 Wis v ACC #4-5 Miami
tie

#4-5 NU v SEC #7-8-9-10-11 Auburn
Big Ten

#6-7 MSU v Big Twelve #4-5
opponent

#8 MN v Big Twelve #8-9
slight edge Big Ten

I came up with 3-2-2, with two of the wins being ever so slight. That means a 4-3 would be a good showing, 2-5 not really surprising. Anything worse would be sad.

Now based on CFRC rankings (which doesn't necessarily prove how bad the B10 isn't, but it should stop everyone from being surprised when the B10 doesn't fare well)

#9 OSU v 6 Ore
opponent

#12 PSU v #11 LSU
opponent

#14 Iowa v #10 Ga Tech
opponent

#29 Wis v #13 Miami
opponent

#57 NU v #36 Aub
opponent

#60 MSU v #26 Tx Tech
opponent

#62 MN v #71 Iowa State
Big Ten

Yes, that's 1-6

As far as the current Vegas odds go, other than PSU being favored over LSU, they go along with cfrc rankings, making a 2-7 record for the Big Ten.

To summarize, even if the Big Ten does what it is supposed to do based on position within relative conference, it is likely the rep of the Big Ten will not change. Most importantly, of course, the teams at the top need to pull off some wins. We really need the conference to start improving in the eyes of the pollsters so the 11-1 2011 Jim Harbaugh-coached Michigan team can go to the BCS Championship game.