More BlogPoll Confusion: Explain Yourselves!

by Peter Bean on Oct 24, 2007 2:29 PM CDT in Football Comment 4 comments

As mentioned this morning, this week's BlogPoll is out. For all the time we bloggers spend carping about rankings among coaches and voters who do not take seriously enough their charge, there remain some headscratching results among the BlogPoll consensus.

Take yesterday's comparison between Texas and Michigan. There's a rather interesting question to be answered regarding how much to penalize the Wolverines for a horrific loss, as well as how much to penalize Texas for no substantive wins. How much should we value Michigan's recent wins against their bad losses? Has Texas done enough to justify a ranking at all?

However you resolve those questions, I'm left looking at the poll and wondering how Auburn is ranked behind either team. I'll be conservative and put Mississippi State in the "bad loss" category, though they're not quite the whipping posts they've been in recent years. Even so, take a look:

The justification for placing Auburn behind Texas is beyond me. Auburn has Texas whipped in quality wins; Texas has matched Auburn in bad losses, and Auburn has one more loss only because it's played two teams (LSU and South Florida) who are far superior to anyone Texas has faced in 2007 outside of Oklahoma. Hell, there's even a common opponent (KSU) who Auburn defeated and Texas fell flat. All told, the more you look at Texas' body of work, the more difficult it becomes to place Texas on the ballot at all.

As for Michigan? Auburn has a win at Florida which spanks the Wolverines' top win. The intermediate stuff is roughly equal. The only case for dinging Auburn is the home loss to Mississippi State, but if you want to penalize harshly for that kind of loss, it has to be uniform. There would be no basis for not applying it to Michigan as well.

Anyone?

--PB--

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Re:

It's Mississippi State. MSU is ranked 11th in the SEC Blog Power Poll. Besides its win against Auburn, MSU's wins have come at Tulane (2-5 overall, 4th in the C-USA west), UAB (2-5 overall, 5th in the C-USA east) and Gardner-Webb (3-4 in I-AA). Granted, MSU's 4 losses have come against ranked teams, but none of them were particularly close. MSU ranks #95 in scoring offense, #74 in rushing offense and #113 in passing offense. They rank #63 in scoring defense, #65 in passing defense and #18 in passing defense.

To put that into context, Iowa State ranks #116, #87, and #85 on offense, and #86, #39 and #67 on defense, in respective categories. Nebraska ranks #63, #66, #29 and #91, #115, #70. Colorado ranks #77, #82, #45 and #48, #35, #34.

If I were ranking, I'd put MSU somewhere better than Iowa State but not as good as Colorado (or maybe even Nebraska). Thus, the MSU loss is something that sticks on voters' minds when it comes to Auburn. Combine that with them just picking up their 3rd loss (and no arguing that they were close to beating LSU...just the previous week, they were close to losing to Arkansas), and you can see why voters are hesitant to raise them that high.

Auburn, like Texas, will have a chance to raise its ranking solely by beating up on bad teams (they play Ole Miss and Tennessee Tech their next two games) before closing out the season with a couple of toughies (at Georgia, Alabama), so it may be a while before we see how good this Auburn team truly is.

My adopted kid is pure genius at the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model.

by jc25 on Oct 24, 2007 3:11 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs

Definition of bad loss

How can a loss to a tier 2 team be a bad loss? Is it because of the margin? Oregon is a good football team and currently ranked 5th in the country so I'm not sure a loss to them is bad, definitely not as bad as a loss to Appy State or Miss State.

by jthorn on Oct 24, 2007 4:48 PM CDT reply actions 0 recs