My answer: My guess is that we will win 1 (more) game at some point, but will likely end with a ranking at 160 or higher. Please God win at least one more game.

https://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaaf/sagarin/


Rest of this post is my rationale for making changes to football staff: this season is statistically catastrophic for this program. This is my first post on this site, so I wanted to give you guys some red meat to chew on although this probably just seems like leftovers from last week at this point.

Not to beat the dead horse, but this year looks to end up being one of our worst Sagarin years ever. Currently, there are ~40 FCS teams ranked ahead of us (Rice @ #165). This is a confluence of our regressing conference affiliation (C-USA West 2nd worst FBS ahead of Sun Belt) and the fact that we can not score any wins against this terrible competition we have signed ourselves up for. At least in the beginning days of CUSA affiliation, the SOS was quite a bit stronger so a 3 win season would still have you around the 80-90 rank nationwide (which used to be the Rice definition of a typical year in terms of ranking). Now, a bad year in CUSA puts you deep into the 100s! And we don't even get to play Charlotte this year!

In the good news, we are sandwiched right between two (supposedly) peer institutions: Harvard and Princeton. Maybe this is a message from the gods to tell us to drop to FCS/altogether. In other news, Sam Houston State is ranked 59 spots ahead of us and that sounds about right at the moment (we would likely be 10-14pt underdogs to them at neutral site).

I have no idea what metrics the BOT/AD will use to judge the performance of the coaching staffs of our various sports, but I have to imagine that being ranked behind 40 FCS schools is not on the to-do list for the football program. Coming into this season, I obviously thought that Bailiff would make it all of the way through the season (since he was allowed to start it) but at some point you have to try something to save face and to retrace some of this disastrous season...damage to the brand (whatever was left pre & post rebranding) is starting to creep into the reputation of the university as a whole. This is historically catastrophic.

Not that I want to sit on internet message boards and keyboard cheerlead about someone losing their job, but I have to hope that plans are in place when we are mathematically eliminated from bowl contention as that is an obvious catalyst to make a change. Especially if the 1-2 losses to get there (depending on if you want to wait for the APR 5 win special which we may not even qualify for) are as ugly as the rest of the season has been to date.

P.S. - Sometimes I take Sagarin with a grain of salt, especially if we have had injuries or unlucky breaks in close games (Vegas odds will show this "rub of the green" when it disagrees with computer rankings such as this). This year has been the exact opposite as it seems we should fully own the #165 ranking if not lower due to 4 of the games being completely over before halftime. Gah.