Thanks for compiling this information. It is of great interest to those of us who eagerly follow all Michigan sports teams.
It is particularly encouraging that most of the teams in the bottom ten of your rankings appear to be on the upswing and seem likely to improve their results over the next 18 years.
Why can't womens basketball be better?? Why dammit?
Since you already have the data, would you consider showing year to year performance line charts for the other Michigan programs.
Keep up the great work.
...post them in the comments. 27 of those charts would make the diary way too long.
W VB
W SB
M BSB
now us softball lovers will not get neg-banged to eternal hell. Now that the truth is out. We have a very special team with an extremely special coach.
I need to go to more gymnastic meets.
All emotions aside...
If I looked at this group as a picture of my overall manufacturing process, I would say there are a lot of opportunities for improvement here. The most consistent programs appear to be the Men’s Swimming and the Women’s Gymnastics programs. The Women’s Softball and Volleyball programs should not be touched and whatever was done there needs to be considered for many of the other sports.
Men’s Baseball looks broken and Men’s Ice Hockey looks like it's in need of an updated maintenance program.
Without any changes, the Men’s Football program looked to be headed for apparent failure.
To understand if the changes have worked, we should be reviewing the data more frequently.
Go Blue!!!
For ice hockey something needs to be done about the OHL. Every fricken summer we get one or two incoming freshman or sophomores jumping. I am starting to join the camp where we should focus the recruiting on the middle of road recruits that are not going to jump, but will rather appreciate a college education and seem to be better teammates. Carl was not heavily recruited. It was Carl's dad who sent Red tapes of him playing and sent Carl to Red's summer camps (Carl's dad is a western grad).
I think you need to factor in how many schools compete in each sport. It's much easier to win a conference championship in men's gymnastics or a national championship in ice hockey or earn points in those sports than in basketball or women's track.
...about how easy it is to win a Hockey national championship, but to your point, the Directors' Cup point system awards different levels of points for national tournament finishes based on the size of the tournament field. Check out the scoring structure here.
You absolutely wrong about ice hockey. There are 60 D1 programs that compete for 16 spots in the national tournament. The NCAA tournament for hockey is one and done. With the semi-random nature hockey is, you might as well flip a coin when you are predicting who will the NCAA tournament (except if you have an all start team like NoDak this season, which is actually more proof of the coin flip theory, we should have gotten our ass beat in the frozen four).
The weighting does not totally reflect the difference in the number of schools fielding sports. As non-bracket sports, women's track and men's swimming receive the same number of points despite the fact that many more schools field women's track teams. As for bracket sports, basketball and baseball have the same size bracket, but many more schools field basketball teams. 22 schools field Division I fencing teams, all but 2 of those placed in the NCAA championships (which included D-II and D-III schools). UNC got 36 points for finishing 19th in fencing, more points than a school gets for losing in the first round of the NCAA tournament, even though less than 1/4 of the schools fielding basketball teams make it to the tournament. Even across sports with different size bracketss, a final four finish in basketball is worth the same as a final four finish in lacrosse or hockey with many fewer teams fielded and a smaller bracket.
I don't think it is accurate to take the points accumulated by the different sports and compare them to one another without taking these factors into account.
...weighting system.
Michigan seems to have issues winning National Championships. Is ths a holdover from Bo's emphasis on winning the Big Ten? 8 NC's in 19 years isn't great given our huge resource advantage. We also lack a completely dominant national power in one sport like Arkansas T&F, UNC W Soccer, Penn St Volleyball, UCLA Softball, etc. that's good for raking in NC's.
I believe you will see Women's Tennis be our next Michigan power, as their new coach has been hauling in the top recruiting class in the nation and has already won two BTT's. Men's soccer will also start competing for BTT's, but are probably a long way away from competing consistently for NC's, even considering last year's run.
I'd also love to see a State of the Michigan Athletic Department type post for each varsity sport, describing where they are as a program, their historical success, their immediate future prospects are, and what their realistic ceiling is as a program.
No substantive comment to share, just thanks for taking the time to put this together. Good read!
Glad to see they snuck into the top 10!
Thanks for doing this. Very cool.
but you show SB and WGYM has having 2 National titles apiece..WSB has won 1 and Wgym none....unless there is some other NC they were awarded outside of NCAA play that I am aware of...
...the table. Check again.
Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't the football team have a nat championship as well?
You're misreading the table. It's confusing some people without a gap between the columns for Conference Championships and National Championships.
Here you see FBS FB with 5 Conference Championships.
Rank | Team | Conf Champs | Rank | Team | Natl Champs |
---|
11 | FBS FB | 5 | NA | W. IT&F | 0 |
Here you see FBS FB with 1 National Championship
5 | W. FH | 9 | 3 | FBS FB | 1 |
...correct. The conf champs/natl champ table is really two tables in one. The teams are rank ordered separately by number of conf championships (the first 3 columns) and number of natl championships (the second 3 columns).
Thanks, didn't realize teams were reranked on the left columns, now I see it.
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