Welcome back college football fans! Since the regular season is at an end, it’s time for some reflection. Today, we are going to explore the FBS conferences in a little compare and contrast mode: aka, why Tulane shouldn’t get a NYE bowl, but they will anyway. Tomorrow, we’ll look at the FCS conferences as week 2 of the playoffs (and the SWAC championship game) are approaching.
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I looked at each conference with a couple of sets of eyes. First, how many bowl-eligible teams are in the conference (for this exercise, I included the recent FCS to FBS promotees, James Madison (11-1/15) and Jacksonville St (8-4/61) who, by stupid NCAA rules don’t officially qualify). Navy (5-6/120) is the only team that’s up in the air. A win in two weeks (after bowl selection, so, um, probably not) over Army (5-6/108) would give them the requisite 6 wins to qualify. A win by Army doesn’t help because they played and beat 2 FCS teams this season and only 1 counts toward bowl games. The same thing happened last year to both Army and App St. The second data point to support the strength of a conference is the number of really good teams. I set the bar at 10+ wins. I ranked the conferences 1 through 11 based on those two metrics. This is a measure of depth.
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But those who have read more than one of my posts (could be just me, could be others), I have more analysis. I looked at winning percentage, without regarding strength of schedule (SOS). Just straight up wins divided by games played. But, there has to be some sort of adjustment. Some conferences play 9 conference games and some 8. So, I just eliminated conference games in this metric. The impact changed the leader from the SEC (101-67 .601, but 45-11 .804) to the Pac 12 (83-61 .576, but 29-7 .806). It’s a better way to compare. I ranked the conferences 1 through 11 based on that percentage. This is a measure of competitiveness.
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Then I looked at the average GCR rank for the teams, just a straight up average. And the same for SOS. I ranked the conferences 1 through 11 for each metric. These are measures of execution and challenge.
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Then I added the rankings, the lower the better. A “perfect” score would be 4 meaning the conference was ranked tops in all 4 areas. The worst would be 44. Here’s how it turned out from worst to first:
| Conference (Teams) | Bowl (10-win)/ Rank | Record/Rank | Avg GCR/Rank | Avg SOS/Rank | Score |
| MAC (12) | 6(2)/8th | 20-28(.417)/11th | 95.08/11th | 108.75/11th | 41 |
| American (14) | 5(2)/10th | 24-31(.436)/9th | 94.64/10th | 104.07/10th | 39 |
| C-USA (9) | 4(2)/9th | 18-19(.486)/8th | 88.56/8th | 103.33/9th | 34 |
| Indies (4) | 1(0)/11th | 18-25(.419)/10th | 83.25/6th | 67.25/6th | 33 |
| Mountain West (12) | 7(0)/7th | 25-24(.510)/7th | 93.08/9th | 101.25/8th | 31 |
| Sun Belt (14) | 12(2)/1st | 36-24(.600)/6th | 83.93/7th | 92.71/7th | 21 |
| Big 12 (14) | 9(2)/5th | 30-12(.714)/4th | 52.14/5th | 38.93/4th | 18 |
| ACC (14) | 11(2)/2nd | 39-17(.696)/5th | 47.43/4th | 41.50/5th | 16 |
| Big Ten (14) | 8(4)/6th | 33-9(.786)/3rd | 45.00/3rd | 34.14/2nd | 11 |
| Pac 12 (14) | 8(2)/3rd | 29-7(.806)/1st | 44.25/2nd | 38.33/3rd | 9 |
| SEC (14) | 9(3)/4th | 45-11(.804)/2nd | 40.29/1st | 26.64/1st | 8 |
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Ok, so what does all that mean. At least by these metrics, the SEC had the best overall season so far (they are prone to do less than exceptionally overall in the bowl season). The Pac 12 has a great chance to take over the number one spot in the last season of this iteration of the Pac XX. The Big Ten could pounce if the post-season lands well for them.
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More importantly, if you look at EVERY prediction of which group of 5 team will make the NY6 bowl game, it’s Tulane. Tulane is the highest ranked G5 team in the AP top 25. For the past few years, the American conference has outperformed the other G5 conferences pretty regularly although the Sun has done a great job catching up. The loss of Houston, Cincinnati, and UCF to the Big 12 starts to show some loss of power. Add 6 teams from Conference USA, a perennial weaker conference (with the MAC) and you get the results we see above. Tulane is 11-1 (18th in the GCR) in a conference that had 3 teams that were 7-0 in the conference going into rivalry week. They play 10-2 (25) SMU for the championship and a win will boost them, sure. Liberty is 12-0 (10th) and will play New Mexico St (10-3/41) for the USA championship, both of whom were independents last year. Losing the 6 teams to the American and adding Jacksonville St (8-4/61) and Sam Houston (3-9/130) boosted the usually last-place USA to a pretty strong case of being stronger than the American. So, why not a perfect team getting that coveted NY6 spot (assuming the Flames win this weekend). Then there’s the dumbest rule in the NCAA which is, of course, known for some really stupid rules, in the case of James Madison (11-1/15). They have the best record and the best conference record (tied with Troy) in the Sun Belt which the data above shows is the best Group of 5 conference. By far!! The distance between the Sun Belt and the next worse conference (Mountain West) is 10 points. That’s the distance from the 11th place conference to the Mountain West (7th place). They are only 3 points behind the Big 12. But, because of the stupid rule that states that no team promoting from the FCS to the FBS can play for a conference championship for the first two years (why does this exist?) AND they can’t play for a bowl game at all in the first year (See Jacksonville St above, although I am really hoping for an exception), and can only qualify in the second year if there aren’t enough 6+ win teams to fill the bowls. So, they might get a bowl because we are 3 short without counting these 2 deserving teams. JMU qualified last year by win total, but 5-7 Rice was selected above them due to APR. But, JMU cannot play Troy in the championship game because of this rule. So, even if JMU gets a bowl, it can’t be the NY6 game because they will be treated like a 5-7 team. Just awful.
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But that’s enough ranting for me. On the field the NCAA has done a lot to protect these kids during the game. Off the field, they aren’t really thinking through how to reward players and teams for a job well done. Thanks for reading and for sharing. Check out the FCS tomorrow (it will be a lot less controversial), G
