How is that ridiculous? Their most impressive wins are Alabama and TAMU. Baylor's most impressive with is a Texas team that is ranked in the 70s. If you forget what the polls were last week and rank based on performance this year than it makes perfect sense.
If BU takes care of business, the polls from this weekend won't matter at all. Having said that...Miss. St. jumped big time because they beat a highly ranked A&M team. A&M became highly ranked because they took a highly ranked S. Carolina team to the woodshed. And that S. Carolina team just got beat by Kentucky. The circular SEC logic is crazy.
It's really less about "circular SEC logic" and more about the absolute joke of assigning preseason rankings in general. A&M got tons of hype for beating 9th ranked South Carolina, but now that South Carolina is proving to be bad and nowhere near worthy of being ranked 9th in the preseason, that win isn't impressive. Stuff like that happens every year.
You're right, it is largely about preseason rankings. But when a top SEC team gets beat it's never because they were overrated...it's always the narrative that the SEC team that beat them was clearly underrated and should jump up 10 spots in the polls for beating such a "great" team. None of it matters, really, though. Just win out.
Miss St. had already jumped big time because they beat a highly ranked LSU team who just got their asses handed to them again. I couldn't agree with you more.
Win this weekend and we move up in the AP and maybe in the Coaches if State takes care of Auburn.. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/GbEtIN39_qw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Not only that but #12 Mississippi State beats #6 A&M and they end up #3 and #14. Combined ranking (lower is better) goes from 18 to 17. Then #11 Old Miss beats #3 Alabama and they end up #3 and #7. Combined ranking goes from 14 to 10. So if you beat a ranked SEC team you jump big time. But if you lose to one, you don't drop all that much. That's the pre-season SEC hype and the circular logic all rolled into one.
While this is true, you also have to look at it in the context of the week. If a gazillion other ranked teams didn't lose, some of these teams may have dropped further. The same thing happened this week, for example, with OU/TCU and Oregon/Arizona and their combined rankings improving. There's certainly an SEC bias, but looking at A&M at #14, what teams below them have looked more impressive to you? None of the 3 teams right below them - K-State, Ohio State, or OkieState - have beaten any ranked teams or done anything particularly noteworthy. For what it's worth, computers take out the SEC-specific bias since they don't know anything about conferences. Here's what one popular computer (Sagarin) says are the ratings: #1 Auburn #2 OU #3 Ole Miss #4: Alabama #5: Baylor #6: A&M #7: TCU #8: MissSt #9: Notre Dame #10: Georgia That's 6 SEC teams in the top 10. 3 of the top 6 have a loss - but all to other top 10 teams. FSU is at #13. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaaf/sagarin/ The SEC "bias" this year in the computers is because their teams went out and beat up on a bunch of BCS conference opponents in their nonconference schedules. The SEC West hasn't lost to anyone outside of it, despite playing some decent teams like Wisconsin, K-State, and WVU, so they all get bumped up.
http://www.colleyrankings.com/currank.html and http://www.masseyratings.com are pretty great too. I like colley because they list the "best win" for each team which helps give you a way to compare teams across conferences. I think the computer rankings got a really bad rap.
Yeah - the computer ratings were nice in composite form. The one thing I didn't like was that they weren't allowed to consider margin of victory. Beating a team by 1 was the same as 50. I understand the discouragement of running up scores, but they could easily have capped it at 20 or 30 or whatnot. A few of the computers have both their "best" analysis and their "BCS" analysis that doesn't allow scores. The Sagarin one that I posted was their "best" analysis. For the BCS version, the numbers are very different. I always found it ridiculous that they basically asked the computer people to NOT provide their best analysis.
Did they eliminate Margin of victory after USC was left out of the championship game? Or maybe they took out SOS into the calculation.
I think it was something to do with 2001, when Nebraska made it - though you'd think that them getting blown out by Colorado would have actually made the opposite case. But some other team apparently got screwed and would have been in had there not been a MoV calculation. So the BCS, in a neverending quest to solve last year's problem, made the change.
Yea. The BCS's perforce was basically gauged by if it put the top 2 teams in the AP poll against each other in the championship game.
Need to check your memory then, because I never said that. I have my beef with Briles for the way he left, and his well documented coaching deficiencies drove me crazy @ UH, plus I felt the Baylor job was aiming a little low for him, but there was never any doubt he was going to bring that program light-years forward from the cellar of cellars it had been in. If he could do it at UH, he could do it at Baylor, that much was obvious.
