Rawls if he can hang onto it, I'd guesss
McFate
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| Date | Title | Body |
|---|---|---|
| 1 year 19 weeks ago | There was some fan angst over Tressel, IIRC... |
... but Ohio State's position when Cooper was let go was closer to Michgian's position when Carr left (bound to a decent bowl, only a couple years removed from a top-five ranking, etc.). They hadn't lived through the equivalent of the last three years, which made them doubt their program. As for the Tressel hire, a lot of the fans thought he was too small-time, and too risky to wager that his I-AA success would translate to the next level. But those were the fans fixated on pipe-dreams like Stoops and Urban Meyer and Gruden, who were never realistic candidates. Tressel got rave reviews from the people who actually knew him, and from Ohio HS coaches. |
| 1 year 19 weeks ago | Urban? |
Not sure I'd be all fired up about someone who has health issues and already retired twice. He's a genius coach, but you wouldn't know whether you'd have him for a decade or just for one or two years. |
| 1 year 24 weeks ago | Sagarin's schedule strength is pretty straightforward... |
... it's just the average rating of all teams played, adjusted for the home field advantage. So it's not really amenable to being fabricated. He'd have to change the rankings of the teams that go into the schedule calculation instead. Since Sagarin thinks the Pac-10 is far stronger than the Big Ten, and since the Pac-10 plays 9 conference games, and since most of the Pac-10 teams schedule at least one decent non-conference opponent... it's not too surprising that he ranks all of the Pac-10 teams' schedules as being pretty strong. (Of the top 11 NCAA schedules according to Sagarin, 9 of them are Pac-10 teams.) Ignoring the site adjustment, Michigan's schedule per Sagarin: Three top-20 teams: 11 OSU, 15 Wisc, 20 MSU Two "second 20" teams: 27 Iowa, 28 ND Three 50-ish mediocre teams: 44 Illinois, 50 PSU, 54 UConn Four cupcakes: 91 Purdue, 99 Indiana, 107 UMass, 158 Bowling Green Oregon's divided similarly: One top-20 team: 3 Stanford Five "second 20" teams: 22 USC, 23 Ariz, 24 ASU, 31 OSU(ntOSU), 34 Cal Three 50-ish mediocre teams: 42 Wash, 51 Tenn, 59 UCLA Three cupcakes: 82 WSU, 168 New Mex, 184 Portland St. Oregon's schedule isn't tons tougher than Michigan's (only 2 points on average) per Sagarin. The difference is one less cupcake and an extra 25-ish team, more or less. If you took Indiana off Michigan's schedule and turned it into a team like Texas A&M, that would pretty much make Michigan's schedule the equivalent of Oregon's per Sagarin. The focus on "winning teams" strikes me as kind of odd. The Pac-10 has a handful of decent teams that ended up 6-6 or 5-7 -- for example, Arizona State who gave Wisconsin all they could handle. You credit Michigan with beating a "winning team" in UConn and another in Notre Dame, but I believe that both of those teams are not as good as ASU, for whom Oregon gets no "winning team" credit. Going to a second level ("winning teams" by opponents) strikes me as even more contrived, as it suffers for the same reason: the Pac-10 having a lot of 0.500-ish teams, and those teams all playing a lot of games against each other. |
| 1 year 24 weeks ago | Smith vs OSU |
Here's a longer version with the play that precipitated the meltdown: |
| 1 year 37 weeks ago | "Exposed"? |
Juice was good for 77 yards passing and 18 yards rushing in a 30-0 shutout at Ohio State last year. Who knows, due to the Zook effect... but it doesn't seem to me that OSU has any more trouble with mobile QBs than any other random team. It seems odd to point to OSU-Illinois 2008, ignoring OSU-Illinois 2009 and the Rose Bowl, for example. |
| 1 year 37 weeks ago | People were talking about him in the spring 2009... |
... and big things were expected from him that year... but he ended up out for the year with a fractured skull and brain trauma from an assault. It's kind of astonishing that he's even back on the field.
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| 1 year 37 weeks ago | Div standing is by overall conference record... |
Delany didn't say that straight out on the TV show as far as I can recall. But in interviews afterward, he was asked and replied that division standings would be determined by overall conference record. So the rumors to that effect weren't true -- or maybe it was just a trial balloon that fell so flat that they didn't go that way. The OSU-Michigan game will not be meaningful for the division title berths often enough as it is; it's good they didn't render it entirely irrelevant to conference standings. This analysis came up with 2 times out of 36 possible, it would have mattered to the division berths to the title game, using the last 18 years of historical data:
But I don't think that analsys uses the officially correct division breakup. "c OR e" means "clinched or eliminated" based on a divisional game that would necessarily have been played (e.g., Michigan-Nebraska in 1997) but historically wasn't. |
| 1 year 38 weeks ago | Good strategy always... |
That's not just a strategy for this year. Why sacrifice even a very tiny edge that any player could provide in the current year, in exchange for nebulous results in some future year? You never know which kids are going to end up out of football, or leave early for the NFL, or get injured, or get passed up by future recruits. I say (as a general policy): redshirt only those who can not contribute anything noticeable this year. |
| 1 year 38 weeks ago | It's theoretically possible, but... |
... back-to-back is worse for TV revenue, and (less meaningful) cross-division games really should be played before division games. A lot of the time, the championship teams would be decided before UM-OSU played, which would be kind of anticlimactic. All FBS conferences use "overall conference record" for determining standings. Years back, the MAC used division record only, but they have since joined everyone else. It's depressing that they're talking about this as if it's a done deal. Here's the letter I sent to Brandon and Smith (OSU AD):
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| 1 year 38 weeks ago | You're right... |
... though I'm not sure whether it's arrogant or simply less-than-honest spin. Yes, everyone agrees that an UM-OSU title game would be a big deal. And there's no doubt that UM-OSU playing for merely a division title makes The Game less meaningful than playing for a conference title as it is now. But what is being quietly swept under the rug is this: UM-OSU playing a cross-division game in October is much less meaningful than UM-OSU playing at the end of the season for a division title -- and that is the OSU-UM game that will be the only one played in 90% of years. Recent history suggests that UM and OSU are each about 1-in-3 shots to win their division. They'll each probably have a perennial power (Nebraska/PSU) and a recent power (Iowa/Wisconsin), and a couple good-on-occasion teams in their division. Add in the fact that the October game between the two will hang a loss on one of them, and you're looking at maybe a one-in-10 to one-in-15 shot for an OSU-UM title game. The Big XII saw one Oklahoma-Nebraska game in 14 years, which is in the same ballpark. Soon we will be recruiting kids who were in kindergarten the last time UM-OSU played in the Big Ten championship game. To them, The Game's only significance will be as a mid-season cross-division game against a perennial power, that's really not all that relevant to getting to the conference title game. It will be an interesting game like UM-ND, but it will not be the game. I don't see the wisdom for killing the meaning of The Game for a twice-per-generation UM-OSU Big Ten title game. The infrequency of the latter makes it a pretty bad trade in my opinion. |
