CollegeFootballPoll.com Message Board

Grayghost wrote:
Do we look at strength of schedule, which seems to be everyone's favorite chew toy. For that we need a tool, we will use Sagarin for now

1. Notre Dame...Average Sagarin Rank of Teams Played...41.33
2. Alabama...49.67
3. Kansas St....56.22
4. Oregon...72.44

This is completely stupid. First of all, averaging position of teams is worthless as a SOS measure. Second of all, why not use Sagarin's SOS instead of inventing a stupid one, If Sagarin's is worth using?

I don't know how Sagarin does their SOS, but it would come out the same in terms of rank:

1. Notre Dame - 16
2. Alabama - 17
3. Kansas State - 33
4. Oregon - 47

Eric wrote:I don't know how Sagarin does their SOS, but it would come out the same in terms of rank:

1. Notre Dame - 16
2. Alabama - 17
3. Kansas State - 33
4. Oregon - 47

Sagarin is a "he", not a "they". He's manically secretive about his formula and he doesn't know much about the specifics of college football, or at least he didn't when he first started his formula.

SOS is a magical stat....the attempt to rank teams that play widely variant opponents with little overlap.

How to do that? There is no one true published methodology. Many formula's use some combination of opponents win-loss record and the oponent's opponent's win-loss record.

The problem is in measuring the "quality" of a win or loss. How to compare an 8-2 UCF with a 8-2 Nebraska?

We all do that every day in a human poll by using a combination of what we know, suspect, and what our eyes tell us. Some of us when comparing two teams use the "which team would I put money on straight up?" test.

Most of us would have Nebraska over UCF...but hten, most of us would have had Bama over A&M....

Oe thing that I do like about Jeff Sagarin..is that he lists the win/losses of every team against his Top 10 and Top 30 teams...a team that has played five top 30 teams ans one Top Ten team probably has a tougher SOS than a team that has played one Top 30 team.

billybud wrote:SOS is a magical stat....the attempt to rank teams that play widely variant opponents with little overlap.

How to do that? There is no one true published methodology. Many formula's use some combination of opponents win-loss record and the oponent's opponent's win-loss record.

The problem is in measuring the "quality" of a win or loss. How to compare an 8-2 UCF with a 8-2 Nebraska?

We all do that every day in a human poll by using a combination of what we know, suspect, and what our eyes tell us. Some of us when comparing two teams use the "which team would I put money on straight up?" test.

Most of us would have Nebraska over UCF...but hten, most of us would have had Bama over A&M....

That is right. At the end of the day it is all subjective. There is just not enough infomation to get it exactly right.

And getting back to Pitt???, they were defeated by lowly UConn 24-17 yesterday for UConn's first conference win. Who knew !!!

Swamp Daddy

ktffan wrote:

Grayghost wrote:
Do we look at strength of schedule, which seems to be everyone's favorite chew toy. For that we need a tool, we will use Sagarin for now

1. Notre Dame...Average Sagarin Rank of Teams Played...41.33
2. Alabama...49.67
3. Kansas St....56.22
4. Oregon...72.44

This is completely stupid. First of all, averaging position of teams is worthless as a SOS measure. Second of all, why not use Sagarin's SOS instead of inventing a stupid one, If Sagarin's is worth using?

I chose some arbitray stuff to point out that there is not a way to really measure this, not the opposite. If you don't like it fine, but don't be insulting, just say you disagree.

As for your question...don't use Sagarin much and didn't notice he already had the SOS in there...wish I had, would have saved me alot of work.

Swamp Daddy wrote:And getting back to Pitt???, they were defeated by lowly UConn 24-17 yesterday for UConn's first conference win. Who knew !!!

Swamp Daddy

And now Pitt???????? is 4-6, needing to win their last two games to become bowl eligible . . . and if they do so, will have an in-conference record of 3-4.

Their next two games are:

home vs. Rutgers --- 8-1 (4-0, in-conference)
@ So Florida --- 3-6 (1-4, in-conference)

An interesting side note: Congrove had Pitt as a preseason project of finishing 5-7 . . . the Panthers are 1 win & 1 loss away from fulfilling that projection . . . with two games left to play.

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Their lives would have been so much easier if they just escaped UConn