Is ACC underrated?

[GTpdm]

Yes, but you are forgetting that the SEC teams all generally play very weak OOC schedules, which allows them to all have wonderful winning percentages. Take note that in my post above, I pointed out that, aside form the end-of-year rivalry games with the ACC, the SEC has played a grand total of 12 games in just over 4 years against power 5 conference teams. And gone 6-6 in those games. That averages out to about 3 such games a year, over 12 teams! Or looked at another way, each SEC team has played one, ONE power 5 game in the last 4 plus years outside the SEC-ACC rivalry games. That allows the SEC teams fatten up their W-L records, and if they are smart enough to schedule decent non Power 5 schools with decent W-L records, then ...ta-da...you look good in that metric even though it means nothing.

Exactly so. If you look at the SEC's schedule this year, pretty much every team faces one FCS and three FBS opponents. The collective win-loss record for those FBS opponents, against other FBS Power-5 teams, is currently 59-85. However, most of the wins in that tally come from traditional ACC rivals (Clemson, Tech, Florida State, and Louiville). If you exclude those teams, the SEC's FBS opponents are collectively 29-76 against Power-5 teams. Other than the ACC teams, the only meaningful opposition has been Alabama playing West Virginia, Auburn playing Kansas State, LSU playing Wisconsin, and Tennessee playing Oklahoma.

All totaled, SEC teams will face only 8 meaningful opponents (9 actual games, since Clemson plays both S.Carolina and Clarke County Community College) in 56 non-conference games. Aside from those eight teams, the SEC's opposition is collectively 8-65 vs. Power-5 teams. And that's not including the one FCS cupcake on each team's schedule.

The narrative of "SEC dominance" is a media fabrication note borne out by actual performance on the field.

 

[DTGT]

They got the preseason rankings because in each of the last two years they have beaten over 3/4 of the FBS out of conference teams they played. If they continue to do that this year (including bowls of course) they will go into next year with high rankings. (see my earlier post #14)

I would just like to add that the SEC lost BOTH BCS bowl games last year.

Also, please allow me to introduce the Null Hypothesis: The odds of an SEC team beating a Power-5 team is 50%.

Until the Null Hypothesis has been disproven statistically, it should be considered correct.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

SoS is not some fact based data point, it is highly subjective. It also fluctuates throughout the year. When should you consider it, at the beginning of the year or at the end? What about in the middle of the year and why is that any better than any other time? It's subjective from the start so it's fluctuations must also be subjective. It makes no sense to me.

This is so true. The sos stats are pretty much worthless when they are based on perceptions made of which teams are best from even before a game is played (hence highly subject to the SEC bias as well as simply to Factory bias). And it is manifestly the case and has been for years that the SEC far more than any other conference has avoided and flat refused to play strong OOC games and true road games against quality opponents. I don't really care if the SEC does or not but the polls and things like SOS claims from whatever site (as if finding ways to try and quantify issues automatically means the obtainment of knowledge) cannot properly account for such contrived scenarios.

Look, teams do not play each other much and there are soooooo many of them. Hence, subjectivity must needs reign supreme w/o any structure in place to decide evaluations of relative strength and compare teams through actual competitive results.

 

[GTNavyNuke]

SoS is not some fact based data point, it is highly subjective. It also fluctuates throughout the year. When should you consider it, at the beginning of the year or at the end? What about in the middle of the year and why is that any better than any other time? It's subjective from the start so it's fluctuations must also be subjective. It makes no sense to me.

What doesn't make sense is how we all try to nail jello to the wall when we try to figure out who is the better team at a given point. There is so much variability in how teams play week to week and so few games. That said, the best tool out there is SOS and having some type of moving average from past seasons to help make up for so few games. I especially like JHowell since they go back to the 1800's and have ranked GT #1 like 6 times!

I understand the argument about the SEC not being so great because they are 6-6 outside of ACC Power6 games. Shows the ACC hasn't been as good on average as the SEC .......

 

[GTNavyNuke]

I would just like to add that the SEC lost BOTH BCS bowl games last year.

Also, please allow me to introduce the Null Hypothesis: The odds of an SEC team beating a Power-5 team is 50%.

Until the Null Hypothesis has been disproven statistically, it should be considered correct.

Uuhhh, doesn't that need to be amended to say non-ACC Power 5 teams?

If you went 5 years further back, it probably wouldn't be 50% ....... could be higher or lower, but probably not 50%. I leave it to the interested observer to check .... night all!

 

[DTGT]

Uuhhh, doesn't that need to be amended to say non-ACC Power 5 teams?

If you went 5 years further back, it probably wouldn't be 50% ....... could be higher or lower, but probably not 50%. I leave it to the interested observer to check .... night all!

I did the math in a previous thread. For 1998-2012, the statistics could not tell the difference between SEC vs power 5 (including ACC) and a coin flip. 2013-14 was not included because I didn't feel like reviewing the seasons to add to the base set of data.

 

[Northeast Stinger]

http://www.jhowell.net/cf/cf2014.htm

FSU's SOS year to date for their nine games has been .544. That's in the "YTD" column. You can see how much stronger other top 10 tens SOS for YTD have been (based on this objective measurement). Also, the "SOS" column is for the whole regular season year including the last 3 games. And given the problems which FSU has had with weaker teams, I think they will have a toss up game with Miami.

The question I have is how will the Number One team in the country (Miss State) do with their upcoming games given how they struggled with teams like UAB and Arkansas.

 

[GTNavyNuke]

The question I have is how will the Number One team in the country (Miss State) do with their upcoming games given how they struggled with teams like UAB and Arkansas.

I agree entirely. But one of the premises of the rankings that I have when ranking them, is that it is only for games played to date. I was talking with my brother (an Alabama fan) and we talked about the ways that all of the SEC teams could be 2 or 3 loss team by the end of the SEC championship. Wouldn't it be hilarious for GT to beat UGAg and then UGAg to win the SEC championship with 3 losses .....

I wouldn't base rankings on games not yet played since you really never know.