No Season Left Behind 2009

 2009 was the beginning of an era that is still today affecting the world. In fact, it's affect is many time larger today than then. I'm talking about Bitcoin, of course! The first black was mined in 2009. The guy was rewarded with a 50 Bitcoin bonus. 

I really need a crystal ball.

What else happened in 2009?

• The Miracle on the Hudson
• The inauguration of Barack Obama
• Somewhat fittingly for this post, the first case of H1N1 Swine Flu was found in CA
• It was declared a global pandemic not long after
• Bolt ran 9.58. I can't even fathom that one.
• Oct 2 was declared Stan Lee day. In LA. I don't care, I'm going to start celebrating it.
• Tiger took his first leave from golf.

How much did things cost?

• New house: $232,880
• Gallon of gas: $2.73
• Stamp: $0.42
• Loaf of bread: $1.77
• Gold, per ounce (Sept 1): $958.00

Celebrities who died in 2009 (holy crap, what a list!):

• The King of Pop, the incomparable MJ
• The sexiest Angel, Farrah
• One of the Clueless ones, Brittany Murphy
• The OG Point Break, Patrick Swayze
• The guy who turned me on to OxiCLean, Billy Mays
• Captain Chaos, Dom DeLuise
• "Heeeeerrre's Johnny!" Ed McMahon
• The Grasshopper, David Carradine
• Another captain, Captain Lou Albano
• The host of Remote Control, Ken Ober (I did not know that he'd passed)
• Larry Gelbart. That is all.
• Oral Roberts. Think he's in heaven?
• Possibly the most trusted man in America for a long time, Walter Cronkite
• Possibly the single most important man in the history of rock n roll, Les Paul
• And the guy who made Shermer High famous, John Hughes

And of course, the top grossing movies of the year:

10. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - never really got into these; Romano's voice
9. Monsters vs Aliens - I kinda liked it; it was different
8. The Blind Side - a football movie!
7. Star Trek - I cordially despise JJ Abrams (yes, I'm a bit of a nerd)
6. The Hangover - loved it, very funny!
5. Twilight: New Moon - ick
4. Up - I enjoyed this mov -SQUIRREL!- ie quite a lot.
3. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - Snape? The story got weird here.
2. Avatar - funny to me how many people had never heard the word "unobtanium"
1. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Michael "Explosions Over Story" Bay at it again

Football time!

It was a pretty interesting year with some pretty good football played. This was supposed to be a year where Urban and Tebow cemented themselves as college football gods. Didn't quite work out that way.

Some of the more interesting games:

#20 BYU vs #3 OU - Sam Bradford gets hurt and the OU season is downhill from the get go:

Navy @ #6 Ohio State - the Buckeyes needed to stop a 2pt conversion to keep out of the "lost the opener" dungeon that the BCS assigned:

Then there was Houston at #5 OkState. Yes, it was the shootout you'd expect. No, none of us really saw this coming:

There was the beginning of the end for Pete Carroll at #3 USC (sorry about the video quality):

And #1 Alabama needed to block two field goal attempts to get past lowly Tennessee:

OK, let's get retro!

Here's a quick reminder of the rules:

• I stop all data at the conference championships. No bowl games are included, as the idea is to provide us with a top 25 that we would have selected playoff teams from.
• All calculations are exactly the same as the current Ray's Rankings calculations.
• I will introduce the top 25 in reverse order
• I will compare RR/BCS/AP rankings
• I will provide 3 different playoff scenarios 
• 4 team seeded
• 8 team with conference champions, top G5, and 2 at large, seeded
• 16 team seeded
• We can all have a good laugh at how different things would have been. Or we can all stare slack-jawed in amazement at how closely Ray's Rankings matches human polls.

I think we can all agree that an uninjured Sam Bradford makes this OU squad much better than 7-5?

Iowa ranked this low at 10-2 made me go check their schedule. They played the bottom half of the conference and lost to 8-5 Northwestern right before losing to OSU. And BSU suffers from weak SoS. My poor Broncos!

PSU suffered from a similar fate, losing to Iowa and then to OSU later. JoePa's last great season. Beating Iowa or OSU (or both) would have pushed the Nittany Lions into the BCS championship conversation. OkSt had that bad beat against Houston. And the Bearcats can commiserate with my Broncos. 

The Andrew Luck-led Cardinal really should have been better than 8-4, but as I've been saying for a while now: the Pac12 (Pac10) cannibalizes itself worse than any other conference.

This sort of sums up the whole Bo Pelini era, doesn't it? Good but not great seasons. So much unrealized potential there.

12-0, but just not enough there to move them up. SOS was weak compared to Texas, which is odd. It's another B1G situation where TCU played the worst of the conference and Texas played the best.

Beamer had the Hokies rolling, but a hangover from the GaTech loss led to the loss to the Heels and here we are.

Johnson and the triple option at a "P5-level" should not have worked. Except for a couple of hiccups, it worked great. UGA was ready for them, though. Still, when was the last time the Yellow Jackets were relevant?

I don't think it's a stretch to call this the changing of the guard in the Pac12. Yes, BSU came into Eugene and hung a loss on them at home, and the lost to a better than their record Stanford, but here's the beginning of the Chip Kelly era.

The early season loss to USC wasn't as bad as the Purdue loss. Purdue. Again. You'd have thought that the Buckeyes would know better.

Meyer and Tebow were one game away from immortality. Instead, they handed the baton to a team that would go on to become maybe the greatest college football dynasty ever.

When you look at the numbers, the top 2 are miles ahead of the rest. Yes, Bama squeaked by Tennessee, but that's what champions do: whatever it takes to win.

Colt McCoy and UT looked unstoppable. But to be fair...

...to be fair, Texas struggled against decent teams. Their average PPG was 39.3, but they only scored 16 vs OU and 13 vs Nebraska (well, they hung 41 on OkSt, so there's that). 

Ray vs the AP

It's actually not too bad (once I fixed my sheet - full disclosure, I messed up a formula and had UF at 33 at one point; but this is the great thing about a computer or math based approach: if it doesn't pass the smell test, you can easily go find out where the issue is if there is one). Florida at 5 is a travesty.

Mean	3.240
Variance	84.440
SD	9.189
SEC	-0.33
Big Ten	-0.80
Pac-12	3.60
Big 12	-1.00
ACC	-2.33
Big East	16.33
Mountain West	14.00

So, the Pac12 is a bumped up a bit, possibly because voters were rewarding Chip Kelly (see what I mean about biases - we can never know why this happened). Easy to see why the Big East and Mountain West were pumped - voters love undefeated teams, regardless of who they play.

Ray vs the BCS

So, more voter love of undefeated teams. Cincy, TCU, and BSU all with the extra push to play BCS buster. Dropping UF to #5 is a joke. Yeah, they lost to #2 Alabama by a decent margin, but I don't believe for one second that anyone thought UF was a worse team than UT, Cincinnati, and TCU. Another perfect example of bias: "Well, you lost one game but these other guys didn't and no, we won't look at SoS! Nyaa!" 

SoS rankings:

• UT 61st
• Cincy 79th
• TCU 100th

and

• UF 28th

Mean	2.760
Variance	96.190
SD	9.808
SEC	0.00
Big Ten	-1.80
Pac-12	1.50
Big 12	-0.67
ACC	-2.33
Big East	17.33
Mountain West	14.00

Pretty large variance here, but still pretty close overall, excepting the Big East and Mountain West. Voters giving the people what they want instead of giving the teams what they've earned.

Playoff time!

Here's your 4 team playoff if this season happened today and people came to their senses when it came to picking teams.

Well, at least Bama/Florida wouldn't be the championship game! I still don't like rematches, but the numbers are the numbers. How about 8?

Remember: P5 conference champs, top G5, and then top 2 ranked after the 6 spots are filled.

You're crazy if you don't think this would have been an awesome mix of games! But 8 is never enough, is it? Give us 16, or give us death!

Now we're talking! 16 teams rewards schools who play tougher schedules even if they lose a game or 3 (I can hear the traditionalists heads exploding from here), and it rewards "lower tier" schools who win out.

What do you think?