Saurian Sagacity Power Poll

I’ve decided a Power Poll is in order. This is not my BlogPoll voting (which is resume based), but an unbiased Power Poll based on NCAA statistics.

Why do this? Well it all comes from a comment left in my “BlogPoll – My Response” piece.

The comment was –

KevinH said...

Here's a question about resume ranking. Say Florida beats LSU. Is it better to have a quality loss (LSU) or better to have a quality win (FL)? This is similar to the Canes over FSU in 2000 (in which they chose quality loss).

Sadly, I didn’t get to address the question directly because the Gators lost in the last minute. But KevinH got me thinking – At what point is a quality loss better than a win?

To determine this, I first had to devise a system where, to the extent possible, I could look at the teams from some sort of Power perspective. In that way, I could decide just which teams are “quality” for the purposes of “quality wins or losses”.

So what is quality or power? I wanted something with totally objective input, so I went to the NCAA stats. I chose –

1. Net Average Yardage – Simply the team’s average yards per game on offense minus the average yards surrendered on defense. I did not choose anything based on points because points are not necessarily the whole story. For instance USC out gained Stanford significantly. I have little doubt USC would beat Stanford 9 out of 10 times. Yet Stanford scored more points due to circumstance, including USC turnovers. I wanted a stat that reflected power absent the sometimes arbitrary results of scoring. Plus, scoring does show up in my next input, which is;

2. Win-Loss Record – It is what it is. Also;

3. Strength of Schedule – We use the NCAA stats for this. Notably, we are using the Past Opposition category.

As far as individual teams in each category

1. Net Average Yardage – The top teams here might surprise you –

1. Kansas
2. Texas Tech
3. West Virgina
4. LSU
5. Hawaii
6. Ohio State

All have over 200 yards net average per game.

2. Win-Loss Record – Anyone paying attention knows.

3. Strength of Schedule – Year to date the ten hardest past schedule belong to –

Stanford
Illinois
South Carolina
Oregon
North Carolina
Kansas St.
Auburn
Oregon St.
Florida
South Fla.

After 6 games in the season, I decided this could work although some teams (U Conn for instance) have still not played a competitive schedule, and as a result may have over inflated statistics. I do feel this Power Poll will get better as the season wears on.

Lastly, any bias in this poll would reflect the weightings given the stats. I’m going to spare everyone the formula used here in the interest of brevity, but know that the stats are essentially “equal weighted” as ratios then added together.

Introducing Saurian Sagacity’s Week 6 Power Poll –

1 LSU
2 Ohio St.
3 Kansas
4 West Virginia
5 Texas Tech
6 Oklahoma
7 Missouri
8 Arizona St.
9 Boston College
10 Oregon
11 Florida
12 Illinois
13 Rutgers
14 South Carolina
15 Kentucky
16 Cincinnati
17 South Fla.
18 Hawaii
19 Southern California
20 Boise St.
21 Connecticut
22 Oregon St.
23 Colorado
24 Texas
25 Wisconsin

And your bottom 10 –

110 La.-Lafayette
111 Eastern Mich.
112 Southern Methodist
113 Middle Tenn. St.
114 Northern Ill.
115 Rice
116 Utah St.
117 North Texas
118 Syracuse
119 Florida Int'l

For the most part, I actually like the way this looks, especially because it is relatively objective.

What does this mean relative to KevinH’s question? Well, it is going to help me determine what a quality loss or win is. Florida’s loss to the number 1 and number 26 (Auburn’s spot) on the Power Poll looks better than, say USC’s loss to the 77th ranked team on this poll (Stanford, of course).

One final note – For those of you wondering why Oregon St (3-3) and Colorado (4-2) are so high in the Power Poll, and why Cal is not in the top 25, know that–

Oregon State – +110 Net Average Yardage, Past Schedule Rank 8th
Colorado - +71.67 Net Average Yardage, Past Schedule Rank 12th
Cal - +37.8 Net Average Yardage, Past Schedule Rank 89th

In other words, the first have played well, and against difficult opponents, despite the losses. Cal has played marginally positive in the net yardage column, against teams with an 8-11 record, good for only 89th nationally.