Vols 12th in ESPN Power Index

If they factor in youth, geriatric assistants, injuries, El Niño, Lamar Odom, and the lat-long of the power T in Neyland, they have to assume we have the best coach in the history of sport.

 

Rocky top got named #1 fight song by USA today. That's got to be worth a couple of points.

 

With or without the gay whoo?

 

We re gonna print for a top 25 finish.

 

But...but...

Down the Field....

 

Be interesting to see how far we plummet with UK, Mizzou, USCe, North Texas and Vandy left.

 

Will be real interesting if/when we go 3-2 down the stretch. We should go 5-0 without even breaking a sweat, but I think Jones will start to tighten up again as bowl eligibility starts to get closer. One loss can easily balloon into two.

 

I was thinking more just in terms of SOS

 

Oh, so wins and losses tend to rank teams correctly...except when they don't at all.

Good talk. I agree.

 

The point of playing is to win championships. Iowa isn't winning any kind of championship this year. No one gives a shit if they finish 12th or whatever in the country outside of Iowa.

 

I can only respond to what people write. And the youtube clip conveniently illustrated how what you wrote was silly. And said silliness will get further caricaturized* with each additional Iowa win. And you have you seen that schedule? I mean, Iowa might lose....or they might not. But either way, they will remain terrible at the game of football. Which is weird, because a wise man once said:

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*Not a word. No reason why it shouldn't be.

 

There is a very important word square in the middle of JG's quote.

 

He goes full retard sometimes

 

Tend? Yeah, he's not making an absolutist claim about wins and losses, but even with the 'tend' in there it's a fairly gross overcharacterization imho. For one, wins and losses in CFB are highly responsive to strength of schedule, and the strength of schedules among cfb teams varies more than my success with females from one month to the next. Secondly, the context of wins and losses is also quite important. This was why the old BCS computers that couldn't take into account MOV were just an absolute insult to anybody with a functioning brain. And the people, like Jeff Sagarin, who were tasked with designing such algorithms straight up told them that the algorithsm they were designing for them were meaningless and terrible.

I'm not excusing Butch's absolute inability to win a close game. Believe me I'm not. But when ranking teams, the compettiveness of the games is someting that absolutely needs to be taken into account in the algorithms because it's meaningful information that I certainly would take into account in making a decision on whether Team A is likely to beat Team B, and that I believe most reasonable humans would take into account in a conversation discussing the same.

Well, that and time of possession.

 

I never go FULL retard.

 

Even MOV is flawed. Urban leaving starters in the game late in the fourth to ensure a 42 point victory rather than a 32 point victory doesn't really do anything for me. There would have to be some sort of cap as to the value of winning a game by multiple scores. Or, a rule that a 21 point victory is a "big" win and there is no more value placed on winning by 56 than 21.

 

S&P+ caps it by excluding what happens in "garbage time", which is a somewhat arbitrary line drawing exercise. And anytime you're trying to cap MOV, it's going to necessarily be arbitrary.

MOV is less flawed than an arbitrary and contrived tweaking meant to lessen its effects imo. Both are better than simply counting wins and losses only, which is actually so terrible an idea it's kind of comical.

 

all of it helps in the event that you can't give all of the the eyeball test, as long as you understand that statistics are flawed and can only account for so many variables.

W/L is equally flawed. This year it would tell you that MS is better than AL and that UF, OU and AR are better than UT.

 

the problem is FPI in particular ignores wins and loses. surely there is a balance there. this is why USC is so ridiculously high. because USC statistically shouldn't be losing to UW and the like, but the fact is they do lay eggs with regularity and lose those type of games. so even if on paper they are a great team, they aren't performing as such and that should be accounted for in the rankings SOMEWHERE.

 

I can see it now.