Greetings oh great and wonderful readers!! Happy Saturday and I hope you have a safe Memorial Day weekend. Last time, in part VI of the series, we finalized the FCS teams. I know, I know, when are we getting to the conferences I’ve at least heard of? In college basketball there are major conferences (football’s Power 5 with a few additions), mid majors (pretty much the Group of 5 in football with some adjustments), and small conferences (mostly FCS in football). Not trying to give basketball too many props, but that distinction seems easier to explain the the 3 Division I groupings. That said, welcome to the mid-majors or in football parlance, the Group of 5.
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For those who had trouble getting through the FCS portion, a quick recap. I’m running a series ranking the conferences from easiest to hardest based on an incredibly difficult and meaningful formula that looks at the 2020 schedule and provides an adjusted opponent’s win total based on that opponent’s 2019 record and location of the game (it also cares which grouping they are in, but too much, I know). The most possible difficult game is a score of 21 (@ 15-0 LSU) and the easiest is Akron, Long Island, or Texas Southern (all winless) for a score of 0 – regardless of where they game is played. FCS schools that play non-division I schools get a tiny tiny score for that game, but it hurts much more than it helps. Then, for each of the 257 teams, I averaged those win totals to get a preseason SOS score. Then the magic of the GCR (i.e. a spreadsheet) sorts them into conferences, ranks those and voila – conference ranking. See? Easy-peasy. The preseason rating (the actual average) is not truly comparable to the actual real SOS calculation which is much more complex (really, it is), but the ranking (ordinal out of 256) of last year’s SOS to the preseason SOS rank is comparable. So if you see the rank go down (a more difficult schedule), it could be an indicator of a tougher year wins/losses wise. And vice versa. For the FCS conferences, I gave a little explanation on why the top or bottom of that conference landed there. For the Group of 5, I’m adding a little more detail for each team. Also, each posting of the FCS had 3 conferences, now there will be 2.
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Ok, with that, here we go with the easiest schedule and the 11th overall – Conference USA. The 14-teams average 5.960 (which is higher than the most difficult FCS schedule). The top 2 teams have preseason SOS scores higher than some Power 5 teams, but the bottom 6 are lower then some FCS teams (UAB has the lowest G5 SOS score – lower than 40 FCS teams). For this part of the series, I’ve added the most difficult game for each team as well as a count of difficult games (opponent adjusted win totals equaling 10 or more) and easy games (less than 5). Here is Conference USA.
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First, the color code – FCS is black and white, Group of 5 is yellow and black. The second thing to note here is that the italics in the Most Difficult Game column indicate a conference game. Every team faces a 10-adjusted-win team except for Middle Tennessee. Based on last year’s SOS rank, look for a resurgence from the Blue Raiders. Western Kentucky has a tough draw so may drop a bit overall. UAB will go bowling again (assuming a full bowl schedule) and could land second in the division again behind LA Tech.
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Cracking the top 10 in conferences is one of just two FBS (P5 and G5) conferences to fail to must multiple 10-game winners. The 12 team Mid-American Conference (MAC) averages a 6.254 score with a top 50 SOS team. Here’s the list.
Akron, winless in 2019, gets to play at the defending runner up Clemson Tigers in September. I’m not sure what that line would be, but it will be close to 50, I’d bet. The big thing I’d like to bring out here is Kent St playing a Power 5 schedule (or at least more than a couple dozen of them). They have the second most difficult September (more on that in future episodes) playing at Penn St, Alabama, and Kentucky. Those Power 5 teams were 30-9 last year. To round out their month, they host Kennesaw St, an FCS team that went 11-3 last year (worth 5.5 points). They could be the best 1-3 or 0-4 Group of 5 team at the end of the month.
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That’s it for today. Please comment and share. Have a wonderful holiday as we remember the service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for this country. G
Robert, It might be interesting to also include the 2019 final GCR for each school. That would give us a better clue for how that school might do beyond their 2019 final record that you give. I know Akron was the worst ranked non-FCS school with their 0-12 record, but how bad were they really? If I remember right, about half the FCS schools ranked ahead of them. I think that will become more interesting as we climb the ladder into the Power 5 teams — not how bad were they really, but how good were they really? What teams have a chance of climbing into the top 25 based on their preseason SOS and how it differs from last year, for example?
Great idea, Carl. That is definitely something I can add. Today, I’ll redo the charts in the latest post and update it.
Carl’s idea has been implemented. No post changes other than the charts, but we’ll be using those going forward. Thanks, again, Carl!!