Ray's Rankings Top 25 Week 2 2021

 Well, that was interesting. 

Quick housekeeping: my sliding scale points system broke the spreadsheet as soon as I added this week's games. Long story short: too many numbers to crunch for a simple spreadsheet. Not sure how to fix.

Anyway, on with the show!

Last weekend gave us a glimpse of the possibilities for this season. Upsets, close games that shouldn't be close, potential catastrophes and actual catastrophes. This weekend did not disappoint. 

Upsets? Yes, please!

• Obviously, Ohio State losing to Oregon was huge. I'll say it was surprising, but not super surprising if you watched OSU v Minnesota. Not sure how Kerry Coombs still has a job. That man has taken some of the best defensive recruits in the country and made them invisible. Hats off to Oregon's coaching staff; they wrecked OSU in every aspect.
• Woooooooooo, Pig! Sooie! I would not want to be Sark today. But I told you guys he's been questionable as an HC, and here we are. The offensive genius put up 256 yards total. The Razorbacks put their foot to the floor and rushed for 333 yards. And Texas wanted to join the SEC?
• BYU beat up on Utah from the get go. BYU was probably underrated, but they were ranked outside the AP Top 25. Utah has designs on the Pac12 'ship, but they'll have to be much better.
• Iowa over Iowa State was only a sort of upset. Truthfully, I had Iowa winning and covering. The Hawkeyes looked great, possibly the class of the B1G if OSU doesn't get it figured out.
• Stanford absolutely stomped USC. Clay Helton's days are numbered, no question. I'm not piling on; I feel that he's been given the chance to make USC relevant again and has not siezed that chance: losing winnable games, and Slovis' regression are just a couple of issues. I bet Luke Fickell got a phone call this morning.

Escape!

• The Hurricanes needed some last minute help to keep App State at bay. Honestly, I was pulling for App State lol! I love underdogs like that.
• Notre Dame should probably stay inside and lock the doors, because no doubt Brian Kelly is looking to execute someone. Toledo rocketed to an almost upset in a game they had no business being in.
• Texas A&M needed it's own miracle to overcome Colorado on the road. Definitely a far more exciting game than they planned on.

Catastrophe

• Florida friggin State. Not quite App State beating the Wolverines in the Boog House, but damn. How the mighty have fallen. 2013 champs, 2014 CFP semifinalists beaten by Jacksonville State, who had been shut out by UAB in week 1! 

Honestly, I figured this weekend for a snoozeer and was more than pleasantly surprised by the ensuing chaos. 

I'm still using the Massey end of 2020 rankings to add data to my system, but it is weighted very lightly. Ray's Top 25 is below. Keep in mind that I am still penalizing teams for playing FCS schools, and double penalizing for losing to one.

 

System Design Update

I'm writing this now so that I can refer to it in a few weeks when my system actually starts to work:

I've been thinking a lot about my system and my original goal in setting this up. A few things occurred to me whilst I was pondering the purpose of my proposed prognosticator.

The overarching goal was to create a 100% unbiased, 100% transparent system, and then to use that system to propose a playoff filled with deserving teams. That goal is still in place, but I feel that over the past couple of seasons I've been fiddling with it too much.

I started with essentially the same system that Ohio and other states use for their high school playoff seedings (I use Ohio because I live here and they publish their methodology). The main difference is that the Ohio system has multiple tiers of schools, from D-I to D-VII, and awards win points based on what division your opponent is in. While the FBS division could probably be broken down this way, it isn't, and so we would end up with Alabama beating East Carolina being worth the same as UGA beating Clemson. I think that we can all agree that these wins are not equal. 

Also, losses in Ohio are simply treated as 0 points. I get it; they need to have a relatively simple system that can be explained to parents when little Johnny's team doesn't make the playoffs at 5-5. But to me, and I expect to a lot of you when a huge underdog wins, that losing team should maybe be downgraded a bit.

They also award points based on the opponents' opponents' records, which we call 2nd level points. I have that, too, and I've added another level (yes, opponents' opponents' opponents' records). More data is gooder.

Ohio modifies points based on number of games played. My system does that as well.

Lastly, Ohio also ignores margin of victory. Again, I get it, but we really should consider MoV in college ball, so I do that.

This season I am going back to basics, with a few tweaks:

1.  As usual, teams get x points for winning games. 
1. Instead of 1pt for a P5 team and 0.5 or 0.75 for a G5 team, I've added a gradient factor. Winning teams will earn the point differential between themselves and the team they beat. There are 130 teams in FBS this season, and there will be 130 rankings. The difference between 1 and 2 is 0.007692, inversely applied (#1 is worth 1pt, #2 worth 0.9923 and so on). So, if you beat #1 you get 1 point, and if you beat #130 you get 0.007692 point.
2. Instead of 0 points for a loss, you lose 0.007692 point for for every rank below #1 of the team you lose to. If  you lose to #1, it costs you nothing; if you lose to #2 it costs you 0.007692, and so on. Losing to #130 costs you 0.9923 point.
3. This was the best way I could come up with to approximate the divisional point differentials in the Ohio system. Upsets reward the winner and penalize the loser based on the ranking difference. 
4. As is usual and unique for my system, you lose a full point for beating an FCS school, and new for this year you lose 2 points for losing to an FCS school.
   
2.  Ohio has 1st and 2nd level points
1. I have 1st level points as described above.
2. I have 2nd level points that are the sum of the 1st level points of the team you beat.
3. I have 3rd level points which are basically the 2nd level points of the team you beat.
3. Margin of victory matters. I will use the College Football Reference SRS number. Because that number gets so big (and small, as in negative numbers), I will be modifying it by a factor that reduces its overall influence. In other words, MoV matters but not as much as winning and losing.
1. I won't know the exact modifier until my first week of real rankings because I don't know exactly how many points the system will generate for 1st-3rd level points.
   
4. Add up the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level points for a master score. Add in the modified SRS number. Biggest number wins. That's it.

Things I've used that I won't be using: 

• My own SRS, as the iterative calculations were really killing spreadsheet performance and giving spurious results, plus I'm not sure I had the formula set correctly.
  
• Average ranking within the different levels. I think the sliding scale of points will accomplish the same thing.
• Any sort of weighting other than reducing the influence of the SRS.
  

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, I have to use an iterative function on the rankings differences. Points make the ranks different, rank difference makes points change, points change make ranks change and so on. I found a good number of iterations with a point variance that gives repeatable results.

Anyway, this is how it will work starting week 4. For now, I am sticking with the weirdness that incorporates my fake pre-season numbers!

Ray's Rankings Top 25 Week 1 2021

Does anyone really take preseason and early season rankings seriously? I mean, besides the media who need some sort of controversy to sell ad dollars to our eyeballs.

As I've mentioned numerous times, my system is retrodictive. Briefly: it looks backwards and measures teams' relative performances. Because of that, it takes a few weeks of data for things to shake out.

In order to provide some sort of rankings in the early season, I figured I'd use my system's 1st level points and Ken Massey's Composite end of season rankings. It took a while to find a reasonable proportion/function for the two systems that sort of resembles what we've seen so far. 

Of course, with my system still missing so much data, we're bound to get some incredibly strange results...

I've already discussed most of the interesting games from Week 0/1, so I think I'll just note the weird rankings for this week and go from there:

Oddities:

UTSA at 3. Weirdness meter is pegged at 100 here. UTSA beat Illinois which had beat Nebraska in Week 0. This makes Illinois a nice trophy in early season points.

Oregon at 4. They are in a similar situation to UTSA, beating Fresno St barely, and Fresno had a win over UConn in Week 0.

BYU at 8. Mostly due to last season's final ranking.

And all the others. It's always amusing to see the early season strangeness. Expect this to continue until around Week 4.

The math works in mysterious ways! When we get to having real data I'll lay it all out for us. 100% transparency!

Iterative Calculations will be the Death of Me

 Just to be clear, I am a bit of a nerd. Not exactly BBT level, but I can completely relate. I am socially inept, but I can fake it to make it. I find formulas and math and statistics interesting (FYI, stats is not math even though it tends to be lumped in with math in most institutions) even when I don't fully understand it all. I like playing with spreadsheets. I wish I knew how to write VBA, and I think I can maybe learn it, but I don't really have time and I truly suck at coding of any sort.

My system is self-calculating in that all I do is download results from Sports Reference and paste them into a specific tab. The only manual manipulation involved is removing their rankings numbers so that my formulas are looking at clean team names. 

What is an iterative calculation? Glad you asked! Putting it as simply as I can:

Team A is rated some # based on the ratings of teams they beat and teams they lose to. In the Simple Ranking System, it's all about scores. So, Team A is rated a number based on the rating of Team B whose number is based on Team A and so on. Now do that with 130 CFB D1 schools times 12 games. Every time you do the calculation, the numbers change and you have to do the calculation again. If you don't set some parameters, the calculations never stop.

You can find a much more detailed explanation here. 

In a spreadsheet, you will get an error regarding a circular calculation in your formula if you try it unless you turn on iterative calculations. When you turn this on, you set the rules for how many times it will calculate based on a set size of change, or how many iterations of the calculations will there be. So I can set the sheet to calculate n number of times but only if the change between calculations is greater than x. My choices are the values of n and x. I must consider the numbers I'm working with (how many decimal places) and the system's capabilities (how fast can the sheet do the calculations). 

If you do not perform enough calculations, it is possible that your numbers will not have settled down enough to stop changing rankings. You may have noted that my system generally operates on 4 decimal places (0.0000). If I tell the sheet to calculate 5 times, it is highly likely that the fourth, third, or even second decimal places will still be swinging wildly high to low and back. If I tell it to calculate 1 million times, Google sheets might actually break and we'll be waiting for the end of time to get a result. Also, if I set the calculation threshold to, say 0.1, then any calculation that results in a change less than that will stop the iterations. If I set the threshold too small, it may make irrelevant calculations and slow down the process too much.

What is the answer? There really isn't one hard and fast rule. For myself, I read a blog post from a guy who set up his sheet to calculate the SRS linked above. I then looked at my system and decided that the threshold should be 0.001 because anything smaller than that is unlikely to make enough of a difference to rankings. I set the number of iterations to 300 based on some trial and error, testing between 100 and 10,000. Google sheets just does not calculate very quickly with the amount of data I feed it. 300 iterations at 0.001 variance appears to work well, and sometimes I do change it to 1,000 at 0.0001 just to see if there are changes.

So, why will iterative calculations be the death of me? My sheet has 2 completely different yet interrelated sets of iterative calculations, and early in the season the swings are crazy big. Sometimes they break the sheet, and then I have to try to track down why I'm getting the dreaded #N/A or #DIV0 error in so many cells. Sometimes the calculations take so long I just hide the window and go do something else, and many times when I get back the results make no sense.

What's the answer? I am finding that I need to set the number of calculations much higher this season after adding my method of measuring for good losses and bad wins, which I will explain when I release my real rankings in a few weeks.

Best. First. Weekend. Ever.

What a spectacular weekend of football! Where do I start???

Thursday

I already talked about Thursday's games, but let's recap real quick:

•  2 FBS teams lost to FCS teams. Granted, Eastern Washington is a damned good FCS squad. But...Tulsa losing to UC Davis? If you recall, Tulsa gave OkSt and Cincy fits last season, and beat UCF and SMU.
• Ohio State beat a very determined Minnesota who came in with 20 returning starters. OSU had a first time starter redshirt QB in Stroud who only threw for 4 TDs and nearly 300 yds. Their starting center was a first timer, sophomore Wypler, along with new starters at RG and RT. And of the back 7 on D, 6 were first time starters with RS frosh WIlliams and true frosh Burke on the corners. The D line did "ok", but I wonder how that game goes if Ibrahim doesn't get hurt. Get well soon, dude.

Friday

Friday I went to the movies with my son to see Shang-Chi - great movie! But I missed the Implosion of Sam Howell. It's not the end of his darkhorse Heisman run considering how the rest of the weekend went, but it sure didn't help. Here are some stats:

9/29, 219yds, 1 TD, 3 INT, loss to VaTech

17/32, 208yds, 1 TD, 3 INT, loss to VaTech

Which line belongs to Sam Howell in 2021, and which to JT Barrett from 2014? Hmm?

And MSU beat Northwestern pretty convincingly. That game was not as close as the score.

Saturday

I went car shopping, looking for a used C4 or C5 Corvette, so if you know anyone selling a C4 ZR1 or C5 Z06...?

Anyway, I got to watch enough Penn State v Wisky to know that neither team looked great. While the result was similar to the UGA/Clemson game, the paths were very different. PSU/Wisky looked like inept offenses vs normal B1G defenses. I was not at all impressed with either team, and I really expected more from Clifford.

Speaking of expecting more, boy did Miami stink up the joint! Bama looked great, as usual. That said, Bryce Young looked human, not that I expected anything less. But the 'Canes looked really just bad and completely over-matched. I had hoped for a more competetive game. Fortunately, when that became a snoozefest there were other games on!

I tried to watch Iowa and Indiana. Ugh. Penix Jr with 0 TD and 3 INT is not the guy we saw and enjoyed last season. Iowa played Iowa football: 158yds rushing, 145yds passing, and 20pts scored by the offense, 14pts by the defense. I expect Iowa to do very well this season, and Penix will probably get it figured out.

I missed the Oregon game, but their struggles with the Bulldogs of mighty Fresno State does not bode well for traveling to the Shoe without Thibodeaux and facing OSU.

So, how about the surprising games from Saturday?

#1 has to be Oklahoma. I had the Green Wave ranked 70th in 2019 and 76th in 2020. How does OU's vaunted and highly praised new-found Big 12 defense give up 464yds to Tulane? And they needed a 4th down stop to preserve the win. At home. The Chosen One had 1 TD and 2 INTs and was outperformed by Tulane's Pratt. I am not impressed, but apparently Joel Klatt feels that OU only deserves to drop one place in his rankings. I'm not buying it.

#2 for sure is UGA and Clemson. 10-3 might seem very similar to the PSU/Wisky 16-10 score, but this was a different game entirely. JT Daniels and DJ Uiagalelei are among the cream of the crop this season, and they had awful games, DJ especially. In this case, I will give credit to the respective defenses. Seriously, the UGA D line and LBs spent as much time on the Clemson backfield as DJ did. The Bulldogs had 7 sacks. Seven! No way was DJ having a good game. And while Daniels was misfiring all night, Clemson's D was also playing lights out. I usually prefer more scoring, but I truly enjoyed watching this game.

#3 Please see my Week Zero Thoughts post: "I'm calling it now: UCLA over LSU by 7+." Yup, nailed it.

Meaningful games at every turn is what made this a fun weekend. They should all be like this! Too bad next week all we have is Oregon-OSU. Pretty much everyone else is playing the Little Sisters of the Poor. 

Ray's Heisman Watch:

QBs

1. Ridder
2. Stroud
3. Young
4. Rattler
5. Daniels
6. Uiagalelei

RBs

1. Zach Charbonnet
2. Kenneth Walker III
3. Mohamed Ibrahim (but this will not last)

WRs

1. Chris Olave
2. Jameson Williams
3. Garrett Wilson
4. Kayshon Boutte

Defense

1. No idea yet - need someone to dominate.

I'll have new rankings out tomorrow after Notre Dame v Florida State.

Let the Beatings...Begin!

 If you get the reference, you get the reference.

Tonight, we get to see many games if we so choose. There's only one that matters, though.

Game of note:

Boise State v UCF - probably the most interesting game for those of us who believe that the 2006 Fiesta Bowl was the greatest CFB game ever (and who didn't really mind UCF claiming a national championship). Bachmeier might be the real deal for Boise, and Gabriel put up some huge numbers for UCF last season. I'm not familiar with Andy Avalos, though I know he played for BSU around 2004. UCF, on the other hand, has Gus Malzhan. I feel like this match-up had more going for it a few years ago. Still, ought to be fun for the first hour.

Ridiculous Beatdowns Coming:

Coastal Carolina v The Citadel

Utah v Weber State

ASU v Southern Utah

The Game That Matters:

OSU @ Minnesota - I remember Stroud's TD run. That's kind of all we have to go on, really. That said, I'm pretty sure my 5'4" widebody could play QB for the Buckeyes this season. All I'd need to do is get the ball in the general vicinity of the best receiving group in the country: Olave, Wilson, Smith-Njigba. And in case  you're wondering about the run game, I've read that Williams is topping the depth chart:

Minnesota returns a ton of talent this season. Morgan and Ibrahim are an experienced duo of high caliber, and the Minnesota defense will have their ears pinned back as they come for Stroud. I don't know how many of you remember JT Barret's first real game (Navy is too strange to be real), but VaTech just plain attacked all night long and it was a miserable night in The Shoe. JT had 3 picks and looked lost while being sacked several times. I expect to see a similar game plan from PJ Fleck. 

The line is heavy for OSU, but it seems that Vegas forgot about away night games being Buckeye kryptonite. I expect OSU to win; I expect it will be closer than Vegas thinks; it will not surprise me to see Minnesota pull of an upset.

Week Zero Thoughts

I don't generally assign too much meaning to first week happenings in college football. It's a long season, lots can happen, and none of us can predict the future. 

That said, I am disappointed in how Scott Frost talked about his team.

"About half of our game plan was kind of out the window when they lined up the way they did"

Yes, he really said that. 

“It looked like the same movie today. We can’t let it be that way. These kids, I feel bad for them because they put in so much hard work. We put a lot on this game, and they’ll bounce back, but I know how much better our team is right now than what we’ve been. Didn’t always look like today.”

And that

“Yeah, we keep doing the same things. I’d have a lot of nickels if I had a nickel for every time we talked about a lot of that stuff. It wasn’t a ton of penalties, it was, I think, five for 67 (yards) is what they said. But they came at the wrong time and the one really hurt us. We’ve got to be more disciplined than that.”

And that.

You know what he didn't say? "I was out-coached today," or "I didn't do a very good job having us ready," or "I have to be better for the guys." 

Mainly he didn't say, "I'm the HMFIC and if there's blame to be had, it belongs to me. The buck stops here."

I'm the boss at my place. If there's an internal issue, I deal with whomever made the mistake. We work it out and get it all fixed. If I have to explain to my boss, "we" have successes, "I" make mistakes. Because at the end of the day, I am ultimately responsible regardless of who does what.

I know that very few if any people are reading this. It's ok, I do this for myself more than anything else. But, if somehow Coach Frost sees this: more I, less we.

 Anyway...

UCLA looked pretty good! I mean, Hawai'i isn't exactly Bama, but they aren't The Citadel either. The University Behind Levitz scored 44 points on under 400 yards total offense. Short fields wins games. Ask Urban Meyer, the master of flipping the field.

I'm calling it now: UCLA over LSU by 7+. I think Chip Kelly has got the Bruins moving in the right direction.

See you all soon!

Ray's Rankings Preseason Top 25

 Hi again, folks!

I thought about this for a little while more which only strengthened my opinion that my system does not allow me to realistically predict anything. This is fine, as it is how it's designed. Of course, this kind of ruins the fun of making a list now and then seeing how well we do at the end of the season. 

I did say in my last post that I'd have something to play with for a preseason Top 25. Here's what I came up with:

1. Take all of last season's rankings: mine, AP, CFP and add up their totals. For example, Bama was #1 across the board so their current total would be 3.
2. Add in 1/2 of the rank using ESPN's SP+. As I mentioned before, SP+ attempts to account for player and coaching changes as well as carryover talent. Why only half? Because that doubles the power. See #3
3. Add the results from #1 and #2 to #3 and the lowest score is the preseason #1
1. If a team was not ranked in the top 25 in any poll, it was awarded 26 points per poll missed (13 for the SP+).
   

See? Not too complicated, no opinions or votes. Of course, the AP and CFP have their biases, but you know my system is straight math and the SP+ is pretty close to that as well, so it's a wash. And I did give more power to the predictive SP+.

There are some shenanigans going on here, though. 

I'm not sure I'm buying Cincy and NC, but I could be wrong there. Definitely not buying Coastal Carolina or BYU! That said, I like Liberty's chances. Notre Dame is riding the end of the season CFP love I think. Anyway, I'll keep this list in my spreadsheet and see how the season turns out.

What do you guys think?

I'll have the finalized ranking formula in a few days. Last season's sheet got so hammered due to missed games that it can't be used now, and 2019 was missing some pieces. I'm still struggling to find a way to reward a good win and penalize a bad loss. I know that's basically what SRS does, but the SRS only looks at scores, not ranking differentials. I'm working on it!

New Season, New Tricks

 Delta! It's the delta variant! Man, I hope we get a regular season in this year.

So, howdy folks. As I (sorta) settle into my new job, I find that I have time to think about this coming CFB season. I hope you have had time to think about it as well.

I still do not have any reasonable way to create a pre-season ranking system that makes any sort of sense mathematically. Instead, I've decided to go in the opposite direction for pre-season rankings, and I think I have a good idea for early season rankings, too. More on that later.

Now, you all know that I am no fan of ESPN. There is no doubt in my mind that allowing them to have any say at all in the CFB Invitational...er, I mean "playoff" is a massive conflict of interest that started with the BCS and continues to this day. That said, some of them have sort of embraced analytics, and I find that their SP+ system has at least a semblance of objectivity. Most importantly for me, it tries to measure production changes from season to season. I will use the ESPN SP+ rankings and then discuss the teams.

1. Alabama - Can anyone argue that Bama is simply reloading? Bryce Young graduated from MDHS is So Cal and looked amazing in HS with the exception of his last game where SJB wrecked him. And who was the QB on the other side of that game?

2. Clemson - DJ Uiagalelei, that's who. It is highly likely that this guy is going to  make Clemson fans forget Sunshine Lawrence by the end of the season. The St John Bosco faithful will love every minute of the season.

3. Oklahoma - OK, Rattler is probably the Heisman front runner to many folks. Not to me, but we'll get to that. I didn't get to watch as many OU games as I'd have liked last year, so all I have to go on is his numbers as they changed part way through the season. I don't know if Riley simplified the gameplans or what. Either way, expect another monster OU offense with a good (for the Big 12) defense.

4. Ohio St. - Returning starters on both sides of the ball explain this ranking. If there's a deeper WR room in the country, I can't think of it, and with that it almost doesn't matter who wins the starting QB role. Olave and Wilson are so good I could have a >100 QBR. And remember the name Zach Harrison.

5. Georgia - Remember when I said Ratter wasn't my Heisman front runner? This is the year we get to see the real JT Daniels. Another MDHS alum, the UGA - Clemson early season matchup should be a lot of fun, and a loss should not hurt either team's playoff chances. If Kirby wants to win it all, this is his season.

6. Wisconsin - I dunno about this one. Lots of returning talent, but always with that pedestrian QB

7. Iowa St. - Again, returning talent and great coaching, but do they have a superstar or 3?

8. Miami - D'Eriq King. All you need to know about the "U."

9. Texas A&M - The Aggies put together a great 2020 season, and I don't see any reason for that to change. Jimbo will have his guys firing on all cylinders. Is the talent starting to catch up to Bama?

10. Penn St. - Another head scratcher. PSU looked awful last year. Franklin will have his guys ready to play, sure, but it's more of a "show me something" season for me.

11. N. Carolina - Sam Howell for dark horse Heisman.

12. Florida - Good team, Mullen has them moving in the right direction, but no Trask?

13. Washington - I am not sold on Jimmy Lake yet, and none of their QBs stand out to me.

14. USC - Truly underrated since Pete Carroll left. This should be a good season to judge if they should have tried harder to keep Daniels or if Slovis is The Man.

15. Oregon - You know, I can recall a time when Oregon was a mid-pack Pac10 team. Now they seem to be challenging for the Pac10 championship every season. Watch this D-line!

16. Iowa - So the teams that had interesting 2020's are hard to predict. Iowa will be good, as usual, but not sure about top 20.

17. Michigan - 6 callers ahead of us, Jimmy! I don't understand how the Wolverines recruit so well and then fall on their faces. I feel like Harbaugh needs to go.

18. Notre Dame - Hmm. This team needs a conference. Yeah, they're ND and they recruit well, but that's not enough any more.

19. Cincinnati - A few years ago I predicted that Ryan Day would leave for the NFL within 5 years and Luke Fickell would be the next great long term OSU HC. He has worked wonders at UC.

20. Texas - Unlike everyone else, I haven't forgotten how bad Sark was at USC. We'll see if anything changes.

21. Utah - Of all the interesting things Urban Meyer did for CFB, this is the interestingest: he made Utah relevant in D1 football.

22. Arizona St. - Probably the most fun team to watch last season. I hope they're as much fun this season.

23. Auburn - Peterson went to UW and took them to the playoff. Anyone think Harsin can do the same for Auburn?

24. Minnesota - PJ will have the guys ready. This is the danger game for OSU early. 

25. Ole Miss - Yet another So Cal QB putting up big numbers. Has Kiffin found his home?

Here we are, folks. Just a few weeks away from the best time of the year. I'll have my system tight before week one, and I'll be using the SRS rankings from last season modified by the ESPN SP+ numbers for the first few weeks. We'll see how that goes. You guys know the drill: my system requires input before it starts to work.

I'll post again soon with the formula for the first part of the season. Until then, be safe and be well!

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?