So after the joy of beating Southern Cal, Notre Dame fans were quickly brought down to earth by seeing the Irish unranked yet again this week. To add to the frustration, Notre Dame saw teams that they beat in Michigan State and Arizona State ranked ahead of us.
So with this in mind, let’s do a blind taste test. Below you’ll find every ranked 2-loss team, the teams we beat ahead of us, a couple 1 loss teams, a 3 loss team, and Notre Dame. We will then break down their wins and losses and show the rankings of those opponents according to Sagarin’s rankings.
Here’s your data (you can click to sort by column, particularly useful for the Win Avg and Loss Avg columns):
[table “” not found /]Taking the above into consideration, let’s say you can only rank the top half of those nine teams.
[poll id=”94″]
I encourage you to take the poll honestly, as I am quite interested in the results. After doing this myself, I’m still a bit hacked off by some of the rankings, but not nearly as much once the data was laid out in front of me.
UPDATE: The poll is now closed and all teams are readily revealed above. Arizona State ran away with this poll and all three SEC teams followed in making the cut of ranked. ND missed the cut by two teams, with 3-loss Washington coming in ahead of them.
- Epilogue - January 3, 2022
- HLS Podcast Finale - January 2, 2022
- The Final Fiesta: Notre Dame vs Oklahoma State NCAA ’14 Sim - December 31, 2021
IrishElvis
My blind poll results show that I’d leave ND unranked this week as well. This blog has lost all credibility with me.
NDtex
#SportsMath 1 – IrishElvis 0
trey
I put in Az St, LSU, or st. Bu if I knew who ASU was, I don’t put hem in over ND because of head to head
HawkND
That was interesting. I had ND as the last of the 4 in doing it blind.
Mr. Wednesday
WTH do 42 voters see in team E?
NDtex
I would wager sympathy for losing to the #1 team.
Brian McKeown (@BrianJMcKeown)
There are no misspelled players’ names or porno references in this piece. Moving on.
Bayou Irish
“There are no misspelled players’ names or porno references in this piece.” This blog has lost all credibility with me.
The Biscuit
I left off ND entirely as well. I do think we’re right on the cusp and if we keep winning we’ll finish Top 15.
The loss to UM killed us. They’re middling and they played lights out and we turned the ball over. We eliminate that L, even by a TINY margin, and we’re top 20 right now.
QuickSloth
Biased as it may be, one thing this does not capture is how ASU beat Wisconsin. Having watched that game live as a neutral party, I thought ASU were gifted the game at the end (granted, Wisconsin could have missed the field goal anyway, but they were not afforded that opportunity). So, in my mind I would vote as if Wisconsin has one fewer loss and ASU has one more loss. I know that opens a big can of worms for voters to project how they thought a game should go, but that was such an egregious example of poor officiating determining a game that I can’t let it go.
Either way, I didn’t have ND in my top 4, so curse you #SportsMath.
trey
Just FYI, that ending was put on the College. Football Offcials game video for bi-week 2 as a botched scenario. Dr Redding used it to instruct the need to be aware of the clock and situation and hurry to spot the ball
NDtex
I think that really goes to a weakness of polling in general and really one of the purposes of doing this little dance.
It’s impossible to watch every single game and even if you tried there is no way in hell you remember every detail. After a while, you just look at a list and start trying to make decisions.
Basically, I’m trying to make humans look at the teams like a BCS computer — here’s the data, give me a result. Hilariously enough, the results are turning out a lot like the pollsters’ results are.
michiana comedy
I, too, had Notre Dame off, favoring “Team I” because I mean, damn, I can’t fault a team for losing three times if it schedule has opponents that tough.
But after I voted I tried to determine which teams were which without using the spoiler, and my bigger quibble than the way the polls sit is how in the HELL Arizona State is #9? If there is one fault with the computer rankings, it’s that they only know what data is input; therefore it doesn’t know that ASU didn’t deserve its win against Wisconsin, clobbered a USC team that had quit on Lane Kiffin, and were fairly well throttled by ND despite only losing by 3.
In theory the human polls should counteract this error when it comes to BCS number-crunching, but the Harris poll also has ASU > ND. So does the AP. What games are these idiots watching?
NDZibby
I think it’s way easier to make a decision when you rank each team’s wins and losses. It’s great that team A/G/D have one more win than everybody, but while team H, F and D have 3rd best wins against top 40 teams, Team G’s 3rd best win is against #96 and A’s is against #88. If you’re talkin top-25 rankings, what has team E done to prove that they’re top 25, except lose to any team they’ve played above 44.
If you’re really looking at it from a resume stance, I like to remove all wins below some arbitrary cutoff of ~80 (top 2/3rds of FBS) and all losses against teams in the top 5 or 10. Those data points are just noise anyone could pick up those data points with a slightly schedule shuffle.
After doing that, I’m probably ranking:
H, I, D, E and then on the fringe is F (us).
Most of those are real close. Interestingly, I think when you actually allow watching the games (and also recognizing that F beat H and G), you also have to factor in that F’s games against 136 was nearly an upset and when both F and H played #38, one destroyed them and got their coach fired, the other hung on for dear life. We probably deserve to be right on the fringe right now….