Blowing up College Football (Part 3)

So, we've established a tournament and reorganized all of the conferences. What's next? Well, we had to figure out who would win, of course, so we went to whatifsports' NCAA matchup simulator and proceeded to barrel through the entire season. Between Steve and I, we simulated 540 regular season games, splitting the conferences between us. we set the schedule like this, using the first team and conference as an example. In New England, we had listed Boston College first, we played all their games first, by playing the next team on the list (UCONN) as a road game. The next game was a home team, then away and so on until we were done. Then we went to UCONN and did the same thing until the schedule was complete. Since we just came up with these conferences with no idea how it would work itself out in the end, and really having no idea that we were ever going to freaking simulate 540 games, there was no intent to give any teams in particular an advantage. So heres how the conferences all worked themselves out. (Steve's edit: Check out the new format)
Before I move on to the next batch of conferences, let me make a couple of comments on these. In New England, I was surprised by two things. First, how well Buffalo did, and second how poorly Penn State did. I really thought they would compete. BC beat Rutgers (and lost to Maryland) head to head to get the top spot.
The three way tie in the Appalachian was settled via real life overall records, since all three teams beat each other. West Virginia and Virginia Tech tied again, but Virginia Tech won their matchup in Morgantown to give them the conference title.
In the Great Lakes, I found it terrible amusing that Michigan only got third, even in a simulation, and Western Michigan snared second place.
And if anything alleges SEC bias in Tennessee's 6-3 record, they should know that the Vols dropped all three games at home, so there was no scheduling bias there. Just a tough break.
One last thing I should mention that I left out of the last post (if you can believe I left anything out). Wouldn't it be fun if placement in your conference also dictated some of your non-conference games for the next year as well? For example, what if all of the 2nd place teams of a 4 conference "pod" played each other, much like they do in the NFL. Since berths in the tournament are based exclusively on conference play, these non-conference games would simply be good match ups, and would, down the road, help with seeding and rankings. Lets keep this pod idea in mind with these 4 conference sets I'm putting up and look at potential match ups for next year. Of this "pod" the fourth place set seems the most intriguing, featuring Penn State, Pitt, Michigan State and North Carolina State. But it's time for more rankings.

Let me start by saying that again, there was no rigging of these standings. Whatif legitimately had Purdue winning the Midwest conference. I think it's funny that Notre Dame was the worst school in Indiana. Additionally, that 5 team tie for second was a blast trying to sort out.
Somehow in the Florida conference, Tulane and Southern Miss got the second and third spots. For all the big bad teams in Florida, the Gators sure had an easy time of it. I was surprised.
The Great Plains was a fierce battle at top, but Oklahoma made things easy by running the table. I was fairly surprised that Arkansas didn't dent the top 5.
The most SEC rich conference, Dixie, was won by Auburn (note that Georgia and Alabama got 4th and 5th), and two ACC teams nabbed second and third. A Sun Belt conference team finished ahead of three SEC teams! Very interesting indeed.
The most interesting set out of this pod is by far the 6th place set. Illinois, Florida State, Arkansas and poor Louisiana Monroe. Can you imagine any of those teams making the trip to Monroe? Kansas-Clemson would be pretty good as well. Notre Dame and Nebraska, down at the bottom of their conferences, would play each other, and other similarly talented schools like Troy and Ole Miss. Wonderful.

The best part about this is that it takes into account that LSU isn't very good away from Louisiana. They lost at Texas to a mediocre Texas team and gave up a chance in the tournament. The rest of the conference was atrocious, with TCU being the only team to really pur up much of a fight. Texas' loss came to Louisiana Tech, of all schools.
The Mountain West. Wyoming. Yep. Also amusing, Baylor's continued ineptitude in another, significantly less talented conference.
In the Great Basin, we had another surprise, as Oregon State pulled off the conference championship. The Beavers weren't as bad as I had thought though, according to RPI. Additionally, Boise State could turn into the next Nebraska in this conference, a big time program in the middle of nowhere.
In the California conference, Steve and I were really hoping for a big USC victory, especially after the previous two. Well, going into the last game simmed, Hawaii looked to be in control, haven won in LA against the Trojans. They were playing at home against Arizona, and incredibly dropped the gam, giving them their second loss. This could definitely be a fun conference pretty much every year.
The best set for the next season from this pod would be the second place set. Texas Tech against Hawaii could net about 200 points. Per half.

Ok, so we have all the conferences sorted out. Then we set to creating the tournament. First we had to seed, which we did first by record, then by final BCS ranking. The seeds sorted out like this : 1 Ohio State 2 Oklahoma 3 Auburn 4 Wake Forest 5 Virginia Tech 6 USC 7 Florida 8 Boston College 9 Texas 10 Oregon State 11 Purdue 12 Wyoming. Without further ado, here are the results of the simulated games.
In the first round, Boston College defeated Texas 23-13, thanks in large part to the hands of Justin Jarvis. Virginia Tech demolished Wyoming, 34-3, surprising nobody. USC and Purdue had a better game than I would have thought, with the Trojans winning 29-10. Florida was the first upset victim thanks to Yvenson Bernard and Oregon State, 17-10.
The second round, surprisingly, saw more blowouts. Ohio State dismantled Boston College 47-3. Virginia tech and Branden Ore nipped Wake Forest 26-12, giving the Deacs their first and only loss of the season. USC shut out Auburn 27-0. The SEC, by the way, went 0-2 in the tournament. Oklahoma trounced Oregon State as Allen Patrick ran for nearly 200 yards. The score was 42-17.
The final four saw Ohio State winning easily over Virginia Tech, 31-13. Beanie Wells scored a couple touchdowns. John David Booty led the Trojans to the championship game over Oklahoma, 41-34.
So there you have it. The two teams, on paper, that should have been in the title game. Ohio State and USC. It was a pretty good game. It turns out Ohio State is a much better team when not playing the national title in their opponent's home state. They won the Victoria Times national championship 27-13 over Southern Cal. Jim Tressel couldn't be happier.


If you read through all of this, you get a healthy pat on the back. I suspect reading it all is as much work as writing everything up. We'll be back with shorter posts starting tomorrow. Let me know what you thought of all of this in the comments!

Blowing up College Football (Part 2)

So yesterday, we ended after deciding that the best idea for a tournament is one that features the 11 conference champions. The rub against this plan is that some conferences, like, for example, the MAC or the Sun Belt well perennially be weak. Of course, this may not always be the case. Just look at what Gonzaga has done for the West Coast Conference in basketball. The whole conference, suddenly, is more respected. It would eventually happen that Western Michigan or Troy or someone would step up and become a prime time team from once of these conferences.
But do you know what the best thing would be? What if we completely redrew conference lines? What if we reassigned all the teams out there to completely new conferences, based entirely on geography? That would, in theory, make everything fair, right? So, after hammering out that tournament plan, Steve and I set to creating twelve ten team conferences to span the country. We started in the Northeast and worked our way to the west. Steve created a map of the conference areas. Below, I'll have the list of teams in each conference, and a little note on all of them.

First, in gray is what we called the New England conference. It features Boston College, UCONN, Army, Syracuse, Buffalo, Rutgers, Penn State, Maryland, Navy and Temple. It seems to be a fairly competitive conference that would likely oscillate between Penn State and Boston College, with Maryland or Rutgers maybe popping in there every once in a while as a champion. Additionally, the Army-Navy game would be played yearly as part of the conference schedule.
In red is a conference dubbed "Appalachian". In it are Virginia, Virginia Tech, West Virginia, Pitt, Ohio, Marshall, Kentucky, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Miami (Ohio) There was really no way to do this without slicing up some states. Chunks of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky were thrown into the mix here. West Virginia versus Virginia Tech would have been a juicy conference game this year.
The Great Lakes conference is in green and contains Ohio State, Kent, Akron, Bowling Green, Toledo, Eastern Michigan, Michigan, Michigan State, Central Michigan, and Western Michigan Of any conference, this contains the highest percentage of teams from the same existing conference, namely, the MAC. Ohio State and Michigan would likely have field days with this conference. Of course, it goes to demonstrate why OSU and Michigan have such paltry non conference schedules. There are a LOT of crappy schools nearby.
The next conference, the Tobacco Road conference (yellow), is heavy on the ACC, because there are so many of their schools in North Carolina, but all of the Tennessee schools are here as well. This means the schools are Eastern Carolina, NC State, North Carolina, Duke, Wake Forest, Tennessee, Middle Tennessee State, Vandy, Western Kentucky, and Memphis. If the SEC is as splendid as I'm told, Tennessee should have no problems here.
The fifth conference, the Midwest, in cyan features Notre Dame, Ball State, Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. This conference is probably the most thoroughly challenge, despite it not having an elite team when Notre Dame is in a down year. Wisconsin should have their way with most of the conference year in and year out.
The next conference, in seafoam green (I worked in a paint department for 3 years. Give me a break) is the Florida Conference. As it's name would suggest, it features all the teams of Florida and three from other states. The included schools are Florida Atlantic, Florida International, Miami, South Florida, Central Florida, Florida, Florida State, Tulane, Troy, and Southern Miss. This could be a brutal conference, especially when all the Florida teams are running on all cylinders. the thought of the Gators annually finishing third amuses me.
The Great Plains is in pink. Thats not an assessment of the talent there, however, as this is a particularly tough draw, featuring many Big 12 powerhouses. The teams are Iowa State, Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Nebraska, Arkansas St, Arkansas, Tulsa, Oklahoma St, and Oklahoma. Arkansas State appears to be the most overmatched team in any conference. Splitting the Red River rivals Oklahoma and texas was the toughest decision we made of them all.
The Dixie (Blue) conference may be the most self assured of all conferences out there, and be fully of the opinion that they are the best. In it are several SEC teams. Overall, the conference includes South Carolina, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech, UAB, Alabama, Ole Miss, Mississippi St. Auburn, and Louisiana-Monroe. Most of these teams are fairly evenly matched, although I would suspect Georgia and Auburn to consistently be near the top.
The Gulf Coast in orange conference was tough to sort out, but this is what we came up with: Louisiana Tech, LSU, Louisiana Lafayette, North Texas, SMU, TCU, Texas, Rice, Texas A&M, andHouston There are 8 teams in eastern Texas to choose from, but there were still three left in Louisiana that needed a conference. This led to a logjam for that conference, and we needed to figure what school to leave out. We kept the schools in Dallas and the schools in Houston all together, which left Baylor and Texas as the two outliers. I pushed for Texas to be left out, because they were the most isolated, but eventually we decided on Baylor, because otherwise LSU would be mostly uncontested in this conference.
The cleverly named Mountain West conference is in goldenrod and features Baylor, Texas Tech, UTEP, New Mexico State, New Mexico, Air Force, Colorado, Colorado State, Wyoming, and BYU. With the schools so few and far between, this was a rather difficult conference to sort out, especially upon looking for that 10th team. It came down to a Utah school or Arizona. We decided against putting Arizona in this conference, even though Tuscon is closer to Las Cruces than Los Angeles, BYU is the furthest south school in Utah so they were elected to join this conference. It's not a huge stretch, since they are already in the same conference as Air Force. This is by far the weakest of the 12 conferences.
The next conference, the Great Basin conference because it includes two teams from Nevada, is in the periwinkle (my brother's architecture professor one time said "What is periwinkle? Maybe it's something I smoked one time when I was in school, but it's not a color"). It features Washington, Washington State, Idaho, Oregon State, Oregon, Boise State, Utah State, Utah, Nevada, and UNLV. This could be a wild conference, with Boise State and their perpetually talented offense, Utah and it's twice a decade resurgence and Nevada with the pistol offense. Not to mention, Washington and Oregon tend to put forth strong squads frequently. Definitely an entertaining group of schools.
The last conference, the California conference (brown), features a lot of sun soaked schools in the southwest, with members including California, Stanford, San Jose St. Fresno St. UCLA, USC, San Diego State, Arizona St, Arizona, and Hawaii. Imagine the embarassment Hawaii could have saved if they had just played Arizona State, USC and California in the regular season. The schools of southern California will likely cycle between championships, but this will certainly be a power conference, as it has six members of the Pac 10.

So Steve and I sorted out these conferences and had a lot of fun trying to figure out who would have won each conference this past season. Who do you think would have won? We'll continue this tomorrow.

Blowing up College Football (Part 1)

I told you a couple of days ago that you were in for a three part post this week. This is part one. old on tight.

I don't know if you noticed, but there is some furor over the way the college football season ends. Some people get pretty worked up about it. The clamor for a tournament is reaching a crescendo, and I find it interesting that both sides are pessimistic. Those in favor of a tournament seem to think that the Pac-10, Big Ten and Big East will never cave. I, in the let's not get too far ahead of our selves, camp, believe that we are already on the slippery slope to a playoff system. Frankly, I thought it was time for a couple of people on the opposite ends of the debate, namely Steve and I, to make some concessions and work out a tournament. So we did that the other night, and after I proposed the idea, it's turned into an almost continuous conversation. We're literally giddy about this. Believe it or not, Steve is getting married in May. Somewhat more believable, I'm single.
It's my understanding that most people in favor of a tournament are that way because they want see the national title earned on the field. I can live with that. For the most part, I think the problem is the fixation on the national title. These are kids playing 4 years in college and, as the commercials tell us, most will be going professional in something other than sports. I think, for the several mediocre to good teams out there, a bowl game is a fitting reward, and a fitting finale to a life of organized sports. Thats the main reason I vote to keep the bowls.
But we can have bowls and a tournament. My major gripe with a tournament is the same as many have with the BCS. It seems rather arbitrary. How would you pick 4 teams to be in a tournament? Are you telling me, for example, that, say, 2 loss Georgia deserved to be considered for a shot at the title, despite not winning their conference? Preposterous. If the complaint is that the title is not won on the field, then we should ensure that it will be won on the field. That leads us to the tournament.
There are 11 conferences in college football right now. The only fair way to have a tournament is to award seeded spots in the tournament to all 11 conference champions. This goes to eliminate almost every complaint in the bowl selection process, in my eyes. Ohio State and the SEC had weak non conference schedules? Well, they'll prove which team is superior at the end of the year. On the field. The Big Ten and Pac 10 get to preserve the sanctity of their conference. Teams are still playing for their conference title first and foremost. It's the only way they can win the National Title. And if they win the conference before the season is over? Well, there is still seeding to play for. And we can force seed the Pac 10 and Big Ten into the 4-5 seeds and have them play in the Rose Bowl every year, if that makes them happy.
The Big Ten will have the biggest problem, of course, with their awkward number of teams. Some year, as Steve pointed out, we could see Purdue and Michigan, for example, be the elite teams of the Big Ten, and Purdue beats Michigan to go undefeated. Then, you have Minnesota, uncommonly strong this year, also go undefeated, while having Purdue and Michigan be the two teams left off the schedule. By Big Ten tiebreaking rules, Minnesota, the team with the longest Big Ten championship drought, would win the conference. A scenario like this would likely lead to one inevitable conclusion, particularly in conjunction with Notre Dame getting left out by not being a member of a conference. Notre Dame would likely join the Big Ten, giving the Big Ten twelve teams and a championship game.
Or, the Big Ten would stick with tradition. that's their prerogative.
Steve also worried about the potential for early blowouts. What's the big deal? In the basketball tournament, we have automatic bids as well, and it's not Florida's fault that Jackson State and the SWAC are miserable. The advantage to the football tournament is that there are 5 teams with a first round bye, if we seed it like the Big Ten basketball tournament, meaning the three first round games will be more evenly matched, any blowout will be lessened, and 8 of the best teams in the country will be playing.
I don't have it all logistically worked out, but I imagine the first three games would be played at BCS bowl sites in New Orleans, Phoenix and Miami, with the winner moving on to a New Years Day game, being in one of those cities. The next two rounds are murky, but for fairness, I think the the host city for the championship should rotate between the conferences.
The BCS rankings would still be used, of course, for seeding. Using those rankings, followed by other poll rankings, then by overall record, here are the pairings for the tournament Steve and I whipped up.
First round


#8 BYU
#9 Central Florida

#6 West Virginia
#11 Central Michigan

#7 Hawaii
#10 Florida Atlantic

After watching Hawaii and Georgia, I think it would alert the world that, in fact, Hawaii was no good after FAU dismantled the warriors.

Round 2 (remember the forced seeding

#1 LSU
BYU/UCF winner

#4 Ohio State
#5 USC

#3 Oklahoma
West Virginia/Central Michigan winner

#2 Virginia Tech
Hawaii/Florida Atlantic winner

That sets up for some pretty good matchups, if you ask me. The ACC can't win in the BCS. Maybe if they were offered a layup like Hawaii, Virginia Tech could change their fortunes. In the end, though, we would get what we wanted. The best teams playing on the national stage. What would be wrong with that? I dare say nothing.
The only gripe, of course, would continue to be that Central Michigan, for example, is given a shot at the title, whereas a team like Missouri is not. That's just the way the conferences are laid out. There are, admittedly, weaker conferences out there, and over time powerhouses would likely emerge from said conferences. Even so, it's a hard sell. If only there was a quicker fix.... (to be continued)