"Fan" Mail

First, a couple words about "BCS Conference Comparison."

I made a couple mistakes in the calculations. I think I did a solid job overall, but I made a few mistakes, the biggest one being that I should have found a better way to compare a 12-team conference to an 8-team conference. Putting the Big East's worst teams against the 7th and 8th place teams from other conferences really hurt the Big East. This didn't cross my mind before I did the analysis, and I regret it. What I probably should have done is followed a system I saw proposed on the Louisville website in response to my post. The guy (whose work I thought was really great), skipped certain spots in the 12 team run down. Like, the Big East had no 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th place team, the Pac 10 lacked a 4th and 7th place team. This would have been a more fair way.

In my study, the Big East finished last, and I'm totally confident doing it in a better fashion, they would have finished 5th, or maybe 4th.

However, that being said, I stand by every single one of my rankings team vs. team. I got plenty of mail expressing...um, poisonous hatred, that the way I picked teams was just "whatever team I felt like picking" or "with a roll of the dice" or, actually "pure, absolute biased idiocy." Well...not really. I guess I took the approach that if I was comparing 60 teams in 8 pages, the article was very long already. Truth be told, I wrote the whole thing with each team's full schedule, stats and conference standing in front of me. Maybe I didn't apply all that correctly, but hey - sorry, I thought you wanted to read an article, and not a novel. It wouldn't be tough to fill 100 pages if you wanted to write about each team's every game, and figure out exactly who is better. But I didn't. However, the fact that people got so bitter the article wasn't longer means they were reading, and caring and for that, I thank them.

Finally, about the Big East. Obviously, we're dealing with Sports Fans here, so the 5 conferences you don't rank last are generally going to shrug and say "not too bad" and the conference you rank last is going to fill your comment box with venomous hate mail. This is how it goes. Its not personal. Well, I guess for the Rutgers fan that said he was "stupider for having read that piece of shit article, and every sentence was an absolute crime on journalism, get a fucking clue and welcome to Jersey" it might have been personal. But for me, it wasn't. Really. The Big East might be a little better than I pegged them. Everyone's free to disagree.

I still believe this: if my coaching future depended on leading an average team to a .500 finish in one conference in America in 2006, I would be betting the farm on the ACC and the Big East, and staying the fuck away from the SEC.

On to the mail bag:

"RU and WVU are both EASILY better than Nebraska. You could also make a casse that any of the Top 3 Big East teams are better than ANY Big 12 team." - Anonymous

Me: Well, you could make a case that Michael Richards is taking the day off for MLK day today, too, but that would be retarded. I projected Louisville better than Oklahoma, so I'm with you there.

Here's the run down on OU vs. WVU and Rutgers.

Wins Over Decent Teams:
OU: at Missouri, at Oklahoma State, at Texas Tech, vs. Nebraska
WVU: vs. Maryland, vs. Cincy, vs. Rutgers
Rutgers: at Navy, Louisville, vs. K-State

Losses:
OU: at Oregon* (if you don't know waht this asterisk is for, you shouldn't be reading this article, sorry.) vs. Texas, vs. Boise State
WVU: at Louisville, at USF
Rutgers: at Cincy, at West Virginia

Notice that WVU didn't beat a single team you could even call decent on the road this year. Oklahoma beat 3 bowl teams on the road. Rutgers has nice wins than West Virginia, but lost to them in 3OT in Morgantown. Oklahoma's three losses are that screw job in Eugene, to the defending national champs, and to the only undefeated team in the country. WVU's losses are to Louisville and a really average USF team. If Rutgers had beaten WVU, I might say you could say they're better than Oklahoma. But...I don't think it shakes out that way.

Reader: "Seventh, why is Pitt any worse than ASU or Minny. Thse 2 teams are pretty mediocre teams, like Pitt."

Me: In games against other BCS schools this year, Pitt went 3-6, with wins over Virginia (5-7), Cincinnati (7-5) and Syracuse (4-8). Two of those three wins came before September 9. They didn't exactly finish strong. AZ State went 7-6, beating two competent teams in Washington State and Arizona, and winning 4 of their last 6. Over the whole year, its close. With how they were playing in November, AZ State is much better. Minnesota isn't very good, but winning their last three games was enough to vault them past Pitt. Beating Indiana, Michigan State (a team that crushed Pitt), and Iowa in their last three gives them an edge over a team with one D-I win since early October.

Reader: "any analysis that comes up with a result that suggests that the ACC was better than the Big East THIS PAST SEASON, is also completely useless"

Me: I love this kind of logic. "Anyone that doesn't agree with me obviously has no merit." Or, "any voter that would do ________ should have their vote taken away." Kind of like when your Mom said if you wanted to go to grandma's house was "completely up to you" and then get mad when you wanted to stay home and play Sega.

Reader: USF can only be beaten with superior strength, like Rutgers. Clemson would not beat Rutgers, USF lost on a dropped two-point conversion. In Tallahassee, FSU and USF would play close. In Tampa, no way FSU wins.

Me: Ain't no way those 'Noles are comin in to TAMPA and winnin!?! Like the guarantee. But you did lose to Kansas and Cincinnati, so don't get ahead of yourself. USF: 1-4 vs. teams with winning records this year. Solid.

Reader: Cincinnati, on the other hand finished just below halfway in the BE, 5th with a 4-3 record. But to get those 4 wins, they had to beat every team below them (Pittsburgh, UConn, Syracuse) plus they had to steal a game from a team above them (Rutgers, WVU, or Louisville). If they lost a game to a team below them, they would have had to steal two games from a team above them.

Me: Geeehhhhhhhhhh....carry the one?

Reader: ACC was a joke, the top of the ACC struggled with the bottom of the Big East, and most matches with the SEC were a nightmare (but the ACC fared better against the SEC than they did with the Big East). WAC had a great team in Boise and another good one in Hawaii and it's 345# RB. QED. If you don't know what that means, stop writing about college football because you must not have gone to college, as your idiotic methodology clearly indicates. To perform research, you need equal sample sizes, and some objectivity. You really failed in the latter, and the former is a solveable problem.

Me: Well. (breathes calmly) Actually, I did to college. But, not in the Big East. Which I'm sure explains my inability to grasp winning sentences like that one, which ends with the whopping logical hammerlock "345# RB. QED." Man, why did I sleep through Logic & Journalism on the Eastern Seaboard 101 back at old Wash U?

Reader: It doesn't matter which #1 from each conference is the best. The 59.5th best team would hypothetically lose to all of them. And it doesn't matter which is the better #12 team in the conferences that have that many teams. The 59.5th team would hypothetically beat all of them.

Me: Usually, probabilistic outcomes have chances between 0 and 100%, and a bit higher variance than thinking the 59th ranking team would lose to the 58th team every time, and beat the 60th every time. If this sounds retarded, please see my explanation for my non existant college education above.

Readers:
Nice blogpost. I think you got it 100% correct. Big East fanboys, get over it!

It's funny to read how upset primarily Big East fans with an inferiority complex are getting over one sports fan's ambitious attempt in a blog to rate the conferences. I get a mental picture of these guys sitting in the glow of their computer monitors, red-faced, gritting their teeth as they pound their frustrations out on the keyboard.

clemson would ass rape any big east team! the big east blows!

Me:
Ah, college football. Not that I ever went to college. Please see above.

Reader:
You've used an interesting blend of "science" and opinion to arrive at your conclusions. The problem is that the methodology is so overtly, nakedly foolish (and you almost arbitrarily use transitive properties in some instances) that I am disinclined to value the opinion-based elements of your analysis either. I've seen that you posted this on practically every board in cyberspace, so I was ultimately drawn to give it a look, but you should be embarassed to put something so ill-conceived out there.

Me:
Made you look.

Reader:
I feel retarded after having read this. That was ridiculously, ridiculously awful. Linking it 150 times doesn't make it less flawed.

Me:
Unfortunately, my goal isn't to have you think I'm perfect. That's the thing about sportswriting. When you write a column praising the SEC, cursing the Big East, and putting everyone else in the middle, 5 people from the SEC are going to compliment you, 500 from the Big East are going to fire bomb your gmail account, and everyone else is going to shrug and, if you can write worth a damn, check back on your next column to see if they should praise you or firebomb your gmail account the next time. And 7,000 people have read the column in 5 days. So that's cool.

Reader:
I think that the reception you received from their clown fans is typical. They aren't polite and unless you say "Louisville is clearly the best team in football, the Big East is the hardest conference...." they freak out and resort to name-calling. They have very little tradition and have to hypermarket things just to get noticed. I liken them to an ugly girl with big boobs. She gets some looks, but she's still a troll.


I think we'll end there. I'll have articles this week on my tour of SEC country last month, The Curse of Tom Brady, and some other good stuff. See you soon, and bookmark the site so you can be first in the firebombing line.