He dared.

There are 119 teams in the Bowl Subdivision of college football. So there are 119 teams in college football that could, by the rules, participate in bowl games after the end of the regular season. There are 32 bowl games in 2007, meaning there are 64 teams participating in college football bowl games this year. About 54% of all bowl subdivision teams get to play in bowls this winter.

So how good are these teams? And how good, really, are the “elite” teams that made it into the BCS games? What about the supposed National Championship contenders, LSU and Ohio State?

To figure that out, I started to look at the Sagarin ratings of every team participating in bowl games, paying particularly close attention to their schedule rankings and their win-loss records. You can view the data I collected here:

As you can see from the data, the average SOS for the bowl-bound teams in 2007 is, um, well, I wont say “pathetic,” but I will say “extraordinarily mediocre.” Of all the bowl teams in 2007, the average SOS is 57.5. So the teams that are going to the bowls aren’t exactly a bunch of upper-tier world-beaters. It’s really just a collection of 64 teams that are, by and large, “ok.” Against that 57.5 average bowl ranking, the teams have managed an average record of about 8 wins and 4 losses. Of all the teams, only 11 managed to play against schedules ranked in the top 11. Only four managed to play against top-10 schedules. Not a single bowl in 2007 will feature 2 teams that both played top-25 schedules.

And really, when you consider that 64, or more than half, of all bowl subdivision teams get to play in a bowl game, those numbers aren’t that shocking. We’re not really talking about the cream of the crop, right? So let’s talk about what’s supposed to be the cream of the crop: The BCS Bowl Contenders. They’ve managed to look just as mediocre and underwhelming as the rest of the bowl teams. Managing only a 54.6 average schedule rating, they did manage to win about 10 games and lose 2. Real leaders of the pack, aren’t they?

I will say, of the teams playing in the BCS, LSU really is probably most deserving of a shot at the national championship. They played against the 21st rated schedule in the country (toughest among all 2007 BCS teams and 10th toughest among all bowl teams) while compiling 11 wins and 2 losses. Ohio State, on the other hand, won 11 games, sure, but they did it against a less-than average 60th rated schedule.

To get a sense of what teams should really be impressed with themselves and their bowl-playing status, I decided to take their schedule ratings and divide them by their total number of wins. I figured that way I could easily see what teams did pretty darn well over the season while taking their level of competition into consideration. It’s not terribly sophisticated data analysis like Biscuit would know how to perform thanks to his “MBA,” but at least I’m pretty. Anyway, the results of my math gave each team a number. A small number, that I’ve called “Team Quality Win-Loss Rank” for completely arbitrary and uncreative reasons, generally indicates that a team has won a relatively large number of games against a relatively difficult slate of competition. LSU’s number is 1.9, correlating with a lot of wins against a top-25 schedule. OSU’s number is 5.4. Hawaii, with their snazzy undefeated record and BCS game invitation, got a 11.42. Why so high? Well, they get to divide their schedule rank by all those wins, but their schedule rank is 137 - an impressive feat when there are only 119 bowl subdivision teams in college football. You read that right. Hawaii’s schedule was ranked below some non-bowl subdivision teams. And by “some,” I mean “many.”

It may just be the fact that, for the first time since 2004, ND isn’t involved in the BCS series, but I’m not feeling terribly compelled to watch many of the bowl games. To get a sense of which games I really should watch, I took my new-fangled “Team Quality Win-Loss Rank” of each team in each game and averaged it out for each game. The BCS Championship game actually ranks pretty well here with a 3.7. Which, I have a feeling, will turn out to have a lot more to do with LSU and their levels of competition than with anything having to do with a Troy Mythless Ohio State. I mean, they don’t even have the Ginn Family on the Buckeye sideline!

Interestingly, Michigan (sucks!) and Florida provide a fairly compelling match-up in the Capital One Bowl. Florida sports the 9th ranked schedule with 9 wins and 3 losses. Michigan (sucks!) has the 35th ranked schedule with a record of 8-4. If Michigan (sucks!)’s team is healthy, and Llloydd Carr can rally the troops one last time, then Ron English’s defense should only give up about 73 points to the Tim Tebowed Spread Option attack of the Gators. Can Florida’s defensive backfield do anything to slow Mario Manningham long enough to eek out a 73-40 win?

Another potentially interesting bowl-game: Oregon vs. South Florida in the Sun Bowl. Oregon may have actually found a post-Dennis Dixon’s Knee version of an actual offense. And they put together an 8 and 4 record against the #7 schedule in the country. The Ducks go up against the Bulls in the closest thing this bowl season has to a meeting between 2 teams that both played top-25 competition (The Bulls had a slate rated #28).

After noticing that there are only 11 teams in bowl games that played top-25 schedules, I decided to see who the 14 teams that also played top-25 schedules were, and what their season results looked like. On first blush, a person who knew very little about college football might look at these numbers and determine that it’s a very bad idea to play top-25 schedules.

1. #1 - Washington: Finished 4-7 with a bunch of vicious and rabid “Dawg Fans” howling for a coaching change.
2. #2 - UCLA: Finished 6-6 with a bowl bid (the toughest schedule with a bowl big, obviously) and fird Karl Dorrell today
3. #3 - Nebraska: Finished 5-7. Fired their head coach and brought in LSU’s DC this weekend.
4. #4 - Cal: Started out looking nearly unstoppable, then fell off a cliff like no other team in the country, finishing 6-6 with a bowl bid.
5. #5 - Arizona: Finished 5-7. HC Mike Stoops narrowly avoided the axe by winning the last 3.
6. #6 - Duke: 1-11. Fired HC Roof last week.
7. #7 - Oregon: 8-4 and looked unstoppable so long as Dennis Dixon could walk.
8. #8 - South Carolina: 6-6 with Spurrier missing a bowl game for the first time in nearly 2 decades.
9. #9 - Florida: 9-3. Urban Meyer couldn’t lie himself out of 3 losses.
10. #10 - Stanford: 4-8. Jim Harbaugh has at least made The Tree an aggressive tree. Nobody at Stanford noticed.
11. #11 - Washington State: Went 5-7 and then “resigned” head coach Bill Doba.
12. #12 - Syracuse: Went 2-10, but, whatever. They’re Syracuse.
13. #13 - Notre Dame: Went 3-9 and forced Mark May, sitting in a studio in Connecticut to ask, “Is this heaven?”
14. #14 - Tennessee: Finished 9-4 and caused me to remark, “Wow! Tennessee is playing in the freaking SEC Championship Game!?”
15. #15 - Colorado: Dan “Obi Wan” Hawkins went 6 and 6, got a bowl bid, and should have the entire Big 12 on notice.
16. #16 - Vanderbilt: Went 5-7. Had a great time doing it.
17. #17 - Oregon State: Finished 8-4 with a bowl bid. I will not make any clever jokes about Beavers.
18. #18 - Florida State: Went 7 and 5, got a bowl bid, wonder if they’ve got the next Joe Paterno on their hands.
19. #19 - Iowa State: Went 3-9 but don’t really care because they beat Iowa
20. #20 - Oklahoma State: The greatest show on turf wen 6 and 6, got a bowl bid.
21. #21 - LSU: Went 11-0 in regulation. Went 0-2 in triple-overtimes. Will play for the MNC sometime in 2008.
22. #22 - Mississippi: Went 3-9 and fired Coach Orgeron faster than he could say “ham.”
23. #23 - NC State: Started out 1-5, fought back to 5-5, got the football world talking, and then flat-lined to a 5-7 finish with a blowout loss to, gulp, Maryland.
24. #24 - Missouri: Finished 11-2, and beat Kansas in what was called “the most important game in the history of these 2 programs.” I’m sure Missouri will enjoy watching Kansas play in a BCS game.
25. #25 - North Carolina: Went 4 and 8 and wonder how long until someone buys out Butch Davis.

So of the 25 teams with top-25 schedules, only 11 made it to bowl games. 5 of these teams fired their coaches. Probably about 4 or 5 more either will fire their coach, or will put him on the hot-seat, or will pray that Joe Paterno hasn’t blabbed about the secret to life after death. So, using incredibly bad statistical analysis, an insanely small sample, and pretending to have no notion of how college football works, I’d say there might be a trend here.

Amazing Strength of Schedule Fact of the Year
The BCS Teams’ average SOS for 2007 is 54.6 and only 1 BCS team has a top 25 schedule. In 2006, the average SOS for BCS bowl teams was 29.3 with 5 top-25 schedules. In 2005, the average SOS for BCS bowl teams was 24.5 and the BCS featured 5 top-25 schedule teams as well. Also a fun fact: In both 2005 and 2006, there were 2 BCS games between top-25 schedule teams. In 2007, there isn’t a single such match up in any bowl game at all.

Share This

• Mmmmm… Optimism…
• Dan McCarthy is Irish
• Okay, Smartass, I Triple Dog Dare Ya