In essentially every organized competitive sport except college football, a win is a win is a win, because as long as you keep winning they hand you better an better teams to play against until it's settled "on the field". But in college football, the nature of the beast is that a win is not a win is not a win. I mean, winning is clearly better than losing, but it's also the case that squeaking by very bad opponents just convinces the computers that you are (at best) slightly better than those very bad opponents. Which is, objectively speaking, likely to be the case. Show me a team that squeaked by inferior competition and then "got their chance" against a top tier team and proved the computers wrong. I'm sure there are individual cases, but if you're a betting man, a team that has a string of games like FAU by 4 and UTSA by 6 is probably going to get manhandled by Enormous State U, even if they are totally undefeated. Witness N. Illinois of last year. There's always a feel good story or two, but in general regression to the mean really does hold true.

(10-15-2013 05:09 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Quite frankly, I don't care what the score is as long as we win.

To me the difference between winning by 1 and losing by 1 is greater than the difference between winning by 1 and winning by 50, or the difference between losing by 1 and losing by 50. That's probably not a predominant feeling on here, but it's mine.

That's how I feel.

I was going to say "exactly how I feel", but I suppose I'll temper it a touch: I feel the opposite if I'm just talking about what I as a fan am learning about my team. A 1-point win tells me very little different than does a 1-point loss, whereas a 50-point win or loss tells me something very different from their counterparts.

So if I'm looking back on a season, I'll take 1-point wins every damn time, and would choose X 1-point wins over Y 50-point wins, for all X>Y.

But early in the season, when I'm both worried about how many we've won AND how many we're going to win, a 1-point loss may not concern me as much as a 50-point win would thrill me.

But that's just me as a fan. If I were coach, I can't get into stuff like that, about worrying what the point differential means about my team's future. As coach, if there's a strategy that increases my chances of winning but simultaneously increases my chances of getting blown out, I absolutely have to choose that strategy over the "safe" one that increases my chances of a respectable score at the cost likelihood of a win.

Obviously winning by 1 is better than losing by 1 and winning by 50 better than winning by 1, much less losing... to the same teams. Winning by 50 implies that you are MUCH better than the other team, while winning by 1 implies you are barely better.... than the same teams.

If you're happy in a conference where the average team you play is ranked north of 90, winning by 1 is fine.

If you'd like to move up, you need to imply that you are MUCH better than 90.... and not just barely.

Of course you can't LOSE to them, but a team that won by 1 was much more likely to "underperform" or get unlucky and lose while the team that won by 50 could make lots of mistakes and still win.

Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine. ;-)

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

(10-15-2013 05:18 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:14 PM)RiceDoc Wrote:  This thread reminds me of the old axiom that offense sells tickets, defense wins games and the kicking game wins championships (or its various iterations). Bailiff IMHO is focused on the latter 2, looking for the resulting wins and championships and bowl games. And your top 10 teams almost all share that philosophy. At the end of the day, 10-2 is 10-2 however you get there. I'll take it as 10 2 point wins if that's what I can get. I'd rather have that over 9 21 point wins and 3 30 point losses. JMHO.

My complaints about Bailiff have pretty much always been that I wasn't satisfied that he focused ENOUGH on the latter 2, particularly not the kicking game in the early years. If we got to be the one team in CUSA that played defense and emphasized the kicking game, I think we could line up in any offense known to man and win lots of games and championships. Ruowls will disagree, and I respect his thinking immensely, but we've spent the last 50 years or so trying to figure out one way after another to outscore people, and the most successful run we've had was when Fred was emphasizing defense and kicking game, and Ken came behind with Wally Ake as DC.

I agree with you on this. Bailiff early on seemed to take on the offense and let his assistants handle the defense even though Bailiff's forte and history was as a DC. I think he still does that somewhat, but has stepped back from both the offense and defense as his assistants have gotten better and he feels he can trust them more. I think as a HC he has always wanted to emphasize defense and special teams, but hasn't had the luxury to focus on that. That is changing - we have better overall coaching on both sides of the ball now and that is moving Bailiff more toward a true HC role and away from a pseudo-OC role.

While I don't think he will ever have his team be designed to have a fast paced offensive simply because it detracts from his defensive mindset that the best defense is a good/time consuming offense, I don't think he is opposed to an RUOwls type offense as long as it can run the clock. Convincing him that you can run the clock and control the ball with an offense that isn't run first, second and usually third mindset is where the difficulty will come.

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

I'd rather win more games, and I really don't care about the score. Go 14-0 and you'll get plenty of press.

I'd probably prefer 17-3. Why? Because I think 17-3 wins are more sustainable. You're not going to score 70 every week. You're not going to hold them to 3 either on a consistent basis, probably something like 24-10 is a more realistic expectation in today's game.

But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

I'd rather win more games, and I really don't care about the score. Go 14-0 and you'll get plenty of press.

I'd probably prefer 17-3. Why? Because I think 17-3 wins are more sustainable. You're not going to score 70 every week. You're not going to hold them to 3 either on a consistent basis, probably something like 24-10 is a more realistic expectation in today's game.

But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

When you get to 11-1 or 12-0, then the margin of victory can mean millions of dollars of revenue, provided you get to a BCS bowl. There's a lot of ground to cover until that matters, though.

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

I know you have posted on sabermetrics in baseball so you are familiar with pythagorean theorem and mean reversion for 1 run games.

Do you believe the same applies in football? Is a 3 point win in football as much about luck as a one run game in baseball? or are the sports so different that you can win six 3 point games in a row and be a solid 6-0 rather than a 3-3 team with good luck?

(10-15-2013 07:43 PM)I45owl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

I'd rather win more games, and I really don't care about the score. Go 14-0 and you'll get plenty of press.
I'd probably prefer 17-3. Why? Because I think 17-3 wins are more sustainable. You're not going to score 70 every week. You're not going to hold them to 3 either on a consistent basis, probably something like 24-10 is a more realistic expectation in today's game.
But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

When you get to 11-1 or 12-0, then the margin of victory can mean millions of dollars of revenue, provided you get to a BCS bowl. There's a lot of ground to cover until that matters, though.

We're not sniffing a BCS game at 11-1. 12-0 maybe. So let's get to 12-0 first and then worry about whether or not we make the big dance.

(10-15-2013 08:21 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 07:43 PM)I45owl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

I'd rather win more games, and I really don't care about the score. Go 14-0 and you'll get plenty of press.
I'd probably prefer 17-3. Why? Because I think 17-3 wins are more sustainable. You're not going to score 70 every week. You're not going to hold them to 3 either on a consistent basis, probably something like 24-10 is a more realistic expectation in today's game.
But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

When you get to 11-1 or 12-0, then the margin of victory can mean millions of dollars of revenue, provided you get to a BCS bowl. There's a lot of ground to cover until that matters, though.

We're not sniffing a BCS game at 11-1. 12-0 maybe. So let's get to 12-0 first and then worry about whether or not we make the big dance.

With this schedule, I don't think we'd sniff it at 12-0 without scoring over 600 points on the season, but yeah.

edit: so, I meant my previous comment as against a hypothetical schedule, not the one where 1/2 of it is Sagarin >100 teams. That said, I think our SOS is roughly 60 in the country.

Margin of victory/defeat matters in football, particularly college football, because there are so few games relative to the other big sports. A 16-1 blowout in baseball or 78-53 blowout in basketball tend to get lost in the noise of larger seasons. But when each game is basically 8% of the sample for the whole season, margin of victory/defeat in each single game becomes more important for evaluating how good a team really is when they only played a small fraction of total possible opponents, and none of them multiple times.

I thought they took MOV out of the computer rankings for BCS.

(10-15-2013 10:07 PM)texd Wrote:  I thought they took MOV out of the computer rankings for BCS.

I thought some rankings limited it to 21 point MOV. I don't follow it that closely, but I thought some of the rankings depended in it, so it factored in implicitly.

(10-15-2013 05:24 PM)OwlFan98 Wrote:  In essentially every organized competitive sport except college football, a win is a win is a win, because as long as you keep winning they hand you better an better teams to play against until it's settled "on the field". But in college football, the nature of the beast is that a win is not a win is not a win. I mean, winning is clearly better than losing, but it's also the case that squeaking by very bad opponents just convinces the computers that you are (at best) slightly better than those very bad opponents. Which is, objectively speaking, likely to be the case. Show me a team that squeaked by inferior competition and then "got their chance" against a top tier team and proved the computers wrong. I'm sure there are individual cases, but if you're a betting man, a team that has a string of games like FAU by 4 and UTSA by 6 is probably going to get manhandled by Enormous State U, even if they are totally undefeated. Witness N. Illinois of last year. There's always a feel good story or two, but in general regression to the mean really does hold true.

This.

It's not the complaint that some of you make it out to be... more of a "I wish"... or "wouldn't it be nice if" or "it sure would be helpful to our cause if"... or "dang... we're so close... if we could just"....


Perhaps I'm not always as diplomatic about it as I should be but i'm frustrated by 40 years of false steps, staggers, mis-steps and "almost's". One of the reasons I've turned so hard on Bailiff is that while he isn't the perfect coach all by himself, he has some VERY admirable qualities and seems to value Rice in the way that The OG values Rice.... which means that unlike guys like Brown and Goldsmith and Todd and Major and 90% of the coaches out there, we might be able to keep him around for a while, even if he is wildly (by our standards) successful... at least long enough to put someone "in line" to replace him from the staff....

but in order to succeed as I want to, we have to stop the "almost's".

I think we're a few coaches, a few dollars and a few players short... and all three of those are driven by having meaningful victories. Meaningful victories are wins over well regarded teams... even if they are in a slump at the moment... BIG wins over poorly regarded teams, and morally meaningful victories of close games against HIGHLY ranked teams.

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

Interestingly, UNM beat NMSU by approximately this score (actually 67-17) in NMSU's last game. UNM had over 500 yards rushing. If there is any game this year that gives Rice a chance to put up a big differential, this weekend could (and should, IMHO, be it). I'm going to Las Cruces, the only game on the regular-season schedule I will see in person this year as it's a 3 hour drive from Albuquerque.

The really great SWC wins were usually not by a big margin.
WE won the SWC championship in 1957 by a key win against A&M 7-6. Froggie Williams field goal in 1949 beat Tesas.

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:39 PM)OptimisticOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 05:38 PM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Obviously I'm not asking to win 70-21. If you want to do it with defense, 17-3 would be just fine.

I'd rather win 70-21. You get more and better press when you win 70+ to anything.

I'd rather win more games, and I really don't care about the score. Go 14-0 and you'll get plenty of press.

I'd probably prefer 17-3. Why? Because I think 17-3 wins are more sustainable. You're not going to score 70 every week. You're not going to hold them to 3 either on a consistent basis, probably something like 24-10 is a more realistic expectation in today's game.

But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

(10-15-2013 11:36 PM)75src Wrote:  The really great SWC wins were usually not by a big margin.
WE won the SWC championship in 1957 by a key win against A&M 7-6. Froggie Williams field goal in 1949 beat Tesas.

really great wins are those over really great teams... and if they're really great, we can't be THAT much better

(10-15-2013 08:09 PM)MemOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

I know you have posted on sabermetrics in baseball so you are familiar with pythagorean theorem and mean reversion for 1 run games.

Do you believe the same applies in football? Is a 3 point win in football as much about luck as a one run game in baseball? or are the sports so different that you can win six 3 point games in a row and be a solid 6-0 rather than a 3-3 team with good luck?

back about ten years ago, TCU won 5 three point games during the regular season. I started calling them Threepoint Christian U. I always felt they got the benefit of some luck that year. Lost their bowl game by 3, IIRC.

(10-15-2013 08:09 PM)MemOwl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 07:32 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  But end of the day with me, 10-2 is better than 9-3, but not as good as 11-1. Only possible exception, 10-2 with a conference championship may be better than 11-1 without. But margin of victory doesn't really matter to me. A win is a win is a win, and you are what your record is.

I know you have posted on sabermetrics in baseball so you are familiar with pythagorean theorem and mean reversion for 1 run games.
Do you believe the same applies in football? Is a 3 point win in football as much about luck as a one run game in baseball? or are the sports so different that you can win six 3 point games in a row and be a solid 6-0 rather than a 3-3 team with good luck?

The games are somewhat different. You don't see any team winning or losing 100% of its games in baseball, so while the Pythagorean analysis is useful, it's useful in a different way. Winning every game 17-3 is going to give you a better Pythagorean result than winning every game 70-21.

What I want to see is consistency. That's why I say the record matters more than the margin. What I don't like is a team that gets really fired up one week and gives a great effort, and then the next week fails to show. And I want to see that consistency as close to potential as possible.

A lot of people have been critical of Todd's team because it didn't really put people away, it just found a way to pull out one game after another. That was probably my favorite Rice team ever to watch. The same players who had looked so hapless under Ken somehow found a way to pull out game after game at the end. I thought that team probably came as close to its potential as any Rice team I've seen.

(10-15-2013 11:03 PM)I45owl Wrote:  

(10-15-2013 10:07 PM)texd Wrote:  I thought they took MOV out of the computer rankings for BCS.

I thought some rankings limited it to 21 point MOV. I don't follow it that closely, but I thought some of the rankings depended in it, so it factored in implicitly.

Texd is right - they only use computer rankings that have no MOV. That's partially why Sagarin now publishes 2 different "pure" rankings, as well as a blend of the 2 (the one that gets most of the notice). He's got one without MOV (used for the BCS), and one with his traditional MOV metric included. He notes that that one is likely the more accurate for estimating margin of victory, not that anyone would ever be interested in it.

I don't know when USA Today started using his blended ranking as the one they publish in the paper versus the one with the MOV. Obviously, you get all 3 online.