RE: Top 7 conferences ranked by W/L vs. FBS/P5
It's always pointless to compare conferences based on their OOC records unless all of them are playing comparable opponents. As is always the case in football, we will be dealing with sample sizes that are too small to be meaningful to yield a valid analysis.
Geography will likely always have a major influence on OOC schedules. The Big Ten will probably always play a lot of games against the MAC, with whom they share a footprint completely. Likewise, the PAC will schedule a lot of MWC teams, because those are the ones in or near their time zones.
If the ACC plays several Big Ten opponents, surely it makes a difference if those are Indiana, Purdue, Rutgers and Maryland or if they are Ohio State, Michigan and Michigan State. If you play enough games, those differences will become smaller as the sample becomes more representative of the entire conference. But we don't play enough games, and probably never will.
It's easy to dismiss rating services like Sagarin, but at least they provide a way to account for differences in schedule strength. And while individuals might disagree with Sagarin's ranking of specific teams relative to other specific teams, there is no evidence of bias in his ratings - at least none that I can find, and I have tried hard to find some.
I have been comparing Sagarin's predicted outcomes based on his home field adjusted power rankings, and I have found that in nearly every game his predicted winner and margin of victory are within a couple of points of the Las Vegas odds for those games. You may not have much respect for Sagarin's rankings, but as a prediction model, they are as good as the best in the business - the odds makers who have no bias other than making money by setting good point spreads.
Those bookies, by design, try to establish spreads that will get as much money bet on one team as on its opponent. Thanks to a "surge" the last two weeks by favorites, they have now covered the spread 50.3% of the time so far this year. Two weeks ago, 50.1 % of the underdogs beat the spread. I don't see how the bookies could do a better job, and Sagarin is doing just as well.
FWIW, Sagarin currently ranks the conferences as follows:
SEC.....79.7
B12.....79.6
PAC.....78.3
ACC.... 75.7
B1G.....75.3
AAC.....67.6
MWC...61.2
MAC....60.3
USA....55.3
SBC....54.6
These rankings reflect performance over 9 weeks. They always become more statistically significant as more games have been played. But rarely do the final weeks of the season bring a major change in their relative ranking.
If you look at conference performance over the past several years, you will see that the SEC, B12 and PAC have been better than the other two P5's by a small but statistically significant margin, and that the ACC and B1G have been neck and neck. The SEC has nearly always been 1st over the past five years, the B12 and PAC take turns in second, and the ACC and B1G take turns bringing up the P5 rear. All of the P5 have been better than the best G5 by a large margin.
This year, the AAC is clearly the strongest G5. Last year, the MWC was, by about the same margin. We have only two years to compare the two conferences, and only time will tell if one is consistently superior to the other. If I were betting, I would bet they aren't. But who knows?
(This post was last modified: 11-03-2015 01:32 PM by ken d.)
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