2024 non-GT games thread

slugboy

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Conferences “looking” pretty even so far, not that it means much. Which is more important for judging conference strength—UT vs NCST or Cal vs Auburn?

 

Root4GT

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slugboy said:
Conferences “looking” pretty even so far, not that it means much. Which is more important for judging conference strength—UT vs NCST or Cal vs Auburn?

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Tennessee was a Top 10 team, NCST was a Top 25 team. Cal and Auburn were both unranked. From a perception perspective the Tenn win over NCST is Much bigger. Casual fans will see Tenn destroyed NCST. Very few will no the score of the Cal - Auburn game.
 
ThatGuy

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Root4GT said:
Tennessee was a Top 10 team, NCST was a Top 25 team. Cal and Auburn were both unranked. From a perception perspective the Tenn win over NCST is Much bigger. Casual fans will see Tenn destroyed NCST. Very few will no the score of the Cal - Auburn game.
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Which was aligned to Hale's point:

Preseason rankings make no sense, and shouldn't be held in any sort of esteem. Maybe NCST shouldn't have been ranked. Maybe Cal should have. Maybe Auburn should have (I'm still not convinced they're not better than FSU, even after the loss to Cal).

If that's the barometer for losing the "perception battle," we're always going to lose it, because the SEC and Big 10 are always going to have more teams in the preseason rankings. Which is a fallacy of the finest sort. The only solution is for fans to stop placing weight in the preseason rankings.

Heck, when Tech wound up ranked, I figured we had a 50/50 chance of keeping it - not because of any Tech curse about us being ranked, but because you just don't know about any team until about 4 weeks into the season. We would all do well to not place weight in rankings until around that point. For the meantime, looking at the OOC W/L metrics seems to be a good directional indicator to follow.
 

Root4GT

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ThatGuy said:
Which was aligned to Hale's point:

Preseason rankings make no sense, and shouldn't be held in any sort of esteem. Maybe NCST shouldn't have been ranked. Maybe Cal should have. Maybe Auburn should have (I'm still not convinced they're not better than FSU, even after the loss to Cal).

If that's the barometer for losing the "perception battle," we're always going to lose it, because the SEC and Big 10 are always going to have more teams in the preseason rankings. Which is a fallacy of the finest sort. The only solution is for fans to stop placing weight in the preseason rankings.

Heck, when Tech wound up ranked, I figured we had a 50/50 chance of keeping it - not because of any Tech curse about us being ranked, but because you just don't know about any team until about 4 weeks into the season. We would all do well to not place weight in rankings until around that point. For the meantime, looking at the OOC W/L metrics seems to be a good directional indicator to follow.
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There is zero chance preseason rankings go away. They bring interest, attention, and money to College Football. Gambling is huge for College football now and rankings matter to many gamblers as well as the many 24/7 Sports talking heads. There is no purity in going about ranking teams. Perception matters. NCST losing badly to Tennessee hurts the ACC’s perception as didCkemson losing badly to Georgia. Both were ranked ACC teams.

Miami’s beatdown if Florida dudnt help theACC as much because Florida was un ranked.

It may suck but it’s the system.
 
Northeast Stinger

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Root4GT said:
There is zero chance preseason rankings go away. They bring interest, attention, and money to College Football. Gambling is huge for College football now and rankings matter to many gamblers as well as the many 24/7 Sports talking heads. There is no purity in going about ranking teams. Perception matters. NCST losing badly to Tennessee hurts the ACC’s perception as didCkemson losing badly to Georgia. Both were ranked ACC teams.

Miami’s beatdown if Florida dudnt help theACC as much because Florida was un ranked.

It may suck but it’s the system.
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I believe you are correct on all counts here.

Since preseason rankings are never going away, I wonder if there is a way to encourage them to be a little less subjective? What we often see is “team B is missing a lot of key players from last year’s 8-4 record but because they have been highly ranked in previous years we think they will reload.”

I think the preseason polls this year overestimated a lot of teams and underestimated several teams. I honestly think there are a few people on this site who could have done a better job (you?).
Anyway, money clearly drives the thirst for preseason polls but I hate that it also has a built in bias for “historic programs” that bring in big bucks.
 
Northeast Stinger

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Just my uninformed opinion but here is how I would rate several of the teams receiving top 25 rankings.

Definite top 5 team or number 1 team:

Texas
Alabama
Georgia

Definite top 10 team:

Ohio State
Miami
USC
Tennessee

Underrated teams:

Oregon
Louisville
Boston College
Syracuse

Overrated teams:

LSU
Missouri
Ole Miss
Notre Dame
Clemson

All the rest of the teams in the top 25 have way too little data and are ranked either because of the conference they are in or because they’ve had one good game.
 
Thwg777

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Northeast Stinger said:
Just my uninformed opinion but here is how I would rate several of the teams receiving top 25 rankings.
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Just curious why Oregon is underrated. I’ll confess my east bias and middle aged bedtime and haven’t seen much of them. But they’ve been favored by 68.5 combined points and have won by 13. They’re a bit like Ole Miss and really won’t play a difficult game until mid-October. But Ole Miss bludgeons their opponents and Oregon is squeaking by.

Clemson is still a mystery to me. They didn’t look like they belonged on the same field in the second half of the ugag game, but absolutely murdered App St, going up 35-0 in the first quarter.

Alabama played terrible last year at USF and did the same this year at home against USF. Their first game on Nick Saban field was a one score game until less than six minutes left in 4Q. I’ll withhold judgement on them until they play ugag 9/28.
 
stinger78

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With as much change as surrounds CFB from year to year these days, any preseason poll is just so much spit in the wind. It’s ludicrous except it succeeds to prop up the media/conference narratives.
 

Root4GT

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stinger78 said:
With as much change as surrounds CFB from year to year these days, any preseason poll is just so much spit in the wind. It’s ludicrous except it succeeds to prop up the media/conference narratives.
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Most of the very top teams in the preseason polls will be very good. Some won't but it's pretty easy to have picked Texas, Ohio State and Georgia as teams that would clearly be in the NC hunt this year.
 
Northeast Stinger

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Thwg777 said:
Just curious why Oregon is underrated. I’ll confess my east bias and middle aged bedtime and haven’t seen much of them. But they’ve been favored by 68.5 combined points and have won by 13. They’re a bit like Ole Miss and really won’t play a difficult game until mid-October. But Ole Miss bludgeons their opponents and Oregon is squeaking by.

Clemson is still a mystery to me. They didn’t look like they belonged on the same field in the second half of the ugag game, but absolutely murdered App St, going up 35-0 in the first quarter.

Alabama played terrible last year at USF and did the same this year at home against USF. Their first game on Nick Saban field was a one score game until less than six minutes left in 4Q. I’ll withhold judgement on them until they play ugag 9/28.
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Oregon should be in the top five. I think they, like Alabama are slow starters this season. I have reasons but it’s long and complicated. I think there’s a good chance Alabama beats uga. But my top 3 teams are interchangeable at this point.

Pollsters have been pushing Ole Miss for three years now (a lot like they push Missouri). They are a good team but I’ve yet to see a reason why they won’t fold up like a cheap suit when they face stiffer competition like the last two years.

Clemson is not a complete team. Against opponents who can’t exploit their weaknesses they will be a juggernaut. Against top teams they will get exposed.
 
Thwg777

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Northeast Stinger said:
Oregon should be in the top five. I think they, like Alabama are slow starters this season. I have reasons but it’s long and complicated. I think there’s a good chance Alabama beats uga. But my top 3 teams are interchangeable at this point.

Pollsters have been pushing Ole Miss for three years now (a lot like they push Missouri). They are a good team but I’ve yet to see a reason why they won’t fold up like a cheap suit when they face stiffer competition like the last two years.

Clemson is not a complete team. Against opponents who can’t exploit their weaknesses they will be a juggernaut. Against top teams they will get exposed.
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Fair enough for me. So many teams have a month + of foreplay so it’s tough to tell until mid-October contenders v pretenders.

I’m a glutton for punishment and took ugag under 10.5 regular season wins so I’m pulling for Ole Miss to finally beat u(sic)ga.
 
Northeast Stinger

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Thwg777 said:
Fair enough for me. So many teams have a month + of foreplay so it’s tough to tell until mid-October contenders v pretenders.

I’m a glutton for punishment and took ugag under 10.5 regular season wins so I’m pulling for Ole Miss to finally beat u(sic)ga.
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I hope uga is overrated but, like you, I don’t think we have enough data. Uga is one of the few programs I give the benefit of the doubt to right now because Smart has established a consistent program that reloads fairly easily.

I can’t decide if everyone is beatable this year and we are approaching parity or whether the shaking out process is going to take us deep into October when we discover, alas, there are only 2 1/2 really good teams in football this year 🙄
 
TromboneJacket

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Thwg777 said:
Just curious why Oregon is underrated. I’ll confess my east bias and middle aged bedtime and haven’t seen much of them. But they’ve been favored by 68.5 combined points and have won by 13. They’re a bit like Ole Miss and really won’t play a difficult game until mid-October. But Ole Miss bludgeons their opponents and Oregon is squeaking by.

Clemson is still a mystery to me. They didn’t look like they belonged on the same field in the second half of the ugag game, but absolutely murdered App St, going up 35-0 in the first quarter.

Alabama played terrible last year at USF and did the same this year at home against USF. Their first game on Nick Saban field was a one score game until less than six minutes left in 4Q. I’ll withhold judgement on them until they play ugag 9/28.
Click to expand...
It’s possible that Oregon might not be as good as they were last year, but they’re usually pretty good, and I wouldn’t write them off at this point.
 

bigrabbit

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bigrabbit said:
It’s probably just me, but not crazy about the 1/4 millionaire thing. Found the link below that says 1/6 of college grads and 1/3 with post grad degree, from anywhere, are millionaires. Then you have inheritance (a factor with 80% of millionaires).

Imo the fast start from a GT degree could be better expressed by the average age of alums hitting $100k+ salary, or % hitting $100k+ by age 30 or 35. The odds of a GT alum being involuntarily stuck making $40-50k-ish forever has to be minimal.

Oh well, back to sports…

www.titlemax.com

What Are Your Odds of Becoming a Millionaire? [Infographic Article]

About one-third of Americans believe that they will most likely become a millionaire in their lifetime. But how likely is it really? What are the odds of becoming a millionaire, a billionaire, or just monetarily successful?
www.titlemax.com www.titlemax.com
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This is what I’m talking about:

The Top U.S. Colleges That Make New Graduates Rich​

We’re #4 on the WSJ list, only two of which (us and Stanford) play Div. 1 sports. Promote this, drop that millionaire thing.
Also promote the fact that as nerd schools go, GT is a fun place. Work hard, play hard, athletics/school spirit, go Jackets.
 
roadkill

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roadkill said:
Cal Football's Media Marketing Dept has been on fire lately. First the billboards, now this:

Cal Football Tweet
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Updated to include Cal's latest Billboard:
GXUbO52WkAAhJZ3.png
 
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