The Big Least?
Posted by thegameonpaper on October 31, 2009
On paper, the Big East looks pretty good this year
In college football today, it seems that at the beginning of the season, the national title game is reserved for USC and whichever team wins the SEC. Thankfully, some upstart PAC-10 team always manages to catch Pete & Co. napping, which opens the door for some other team to get in on the National Title action. However, winning the SEC in the minds of the pollsters seems to be a guaranteed ticket to the BCS title game. This really makes no sense when you consider the preponderance of Big Ten alumni who vote as coaches and who are present in the mainstream sports media. If anything, you’d think that they would be Big Ten apologists. Instead, it seems like every year the Big Ten is “down again” and the comings and goings of Big East teams are nearly irrelevant.
Perhaps this is because of the SEC making LOLhio State their whipping post two years in a row, while the poor record in the Bowl Season hasn’t helped the qualitative reputation of the Big Ten either. Perhaps this is also because every time a Big East team cracks the top two spot (e.g. South Florida and West Virginia), they, like Icarus, fail to sustain their flight to the sun. Whatever the reason for this anti-Big East and anti-Big Ten bias, it is not shared here at the Game on Paper.
Using this week’s TGOPoll, I took the average of the team ratings for each conference and found some surprising results. First of all, despite being another “down year” for the Big Ten, it is ranked 4th among the 11 BCS conferences — ahead of the PAC-10 and ACC mind you.
Even more interesting than the upward trend for the Big Ten is that pound for pound, the Big East appears to be the best conference in the country. With Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, South Florida, Rutgers, and West Virginia all ranked in the Top 15 of the TGOPoll, this ranking seems a little less surprising. Even the BCS has three Big East teams in its Top 25 (although with WVU’s loss to USF this week, that may not continue). What this means is that basically half of the conference is ranked among the Top 25 teams in the country. That’s 3/8 at worst, which by percentage is a pretty good showing.
Now, one of the “tricks of math” that might be occurring here is that the Big East is also the smallest of the “Big” conferences. The rest have between 10-12 teams whereas the Big East only has 8. So in a year where 3-5 teams are in the Top 25, the conference looks good, whereas the SEC might also have 3-5 teams in the Top 25, but not benefit quite as much given the overall size of the conference. So, as an experiment, I narrowed each conference down to its Top 8 teams to see if that made a difference in the ratings. What I discovered was that the Big East was still, pound for
On paper, a rising tide DOES float all ships
pound, the strongest conference on paper. Among the top four conferences, there was no movement in position. The SEC caught up quite a bit and the Big XII widened its position ahead of the Big Ten, but there were no changes in the rankings. The surprising shift was the I-A Independents and the MAC leap-frogging the ACC and the PAC-10.
So this leaves us wondering, why the love for USC and the SEC Champion? If the PAC-10 is the weakest of the “Big” conferences, and the SEC is not the best conference in the country, then why do those teams get such automatically preferential treatment from the other pollsters? They must know something I don’t, but when I play the game on paper, I see no reason to build in a conference bias of any sort.
