I love the bowl season because it gives us wonderful non-conference action. The bowl season is the one time where conference judgment is almost objective.
I’ve devised a formula to help make sense of all 34 bowl games and how the conferences stack up respectively. A team and its conference gets one point for making it to a bowl but not being able to get that W. (It’s all about that W, right?) Winning a crappy bowl is little better than losing in a bowl, so I allotted the points as such. For a team with a win in a third-tier bowl, they get 2 points. For a team with a win in a second-tier bowl win, they get 3 points. For a team with a win in a BCS game, they get 4 points. (except for one BCS bowl; can you guess which one?) For a national title win, that team and respective conference gets five points. Then I take all of the points and add them together and compare the scores (don’t worry; I’ll do this again once the bowls are over). So even if team A wins the national title, team A’s conference will need their other teams to perform well to win my bowl conference challenge.
To decide between the tier of the bowls, I usually used the records for both teams. For instance, if both teams’ records combined for 12-14 wins (before the bowl game), then they were definitely in a 3rd tier bowl. If the teams combined for 15 wins, then it was a gut call as to whether they were 3rd or 2nd tier. 16 combined wins and up usually got you a 2nd tier bowl game spot (the only exception was the Texas Bowl for obvious reasons). I have only 2 more 2nd tier than 3rd tier.
Here’s a list of where I placed each bowl:
Third Tier:
Eagle Bank (Wake Forest-Navy), New Mexico (Colorado St.-Fresno), Saint Petersburg (Memphis-USF), New Orleans (Southern Miss.-Troy), Hawaii (Hawaii-Notre Dame), Motor City (FAU-Central Mich.), Independence (NIU-Louisiana Tech), PapaJohn’s.com (NC State-Rutgers), Humanitarian (Maryland-Nevada), Texas (W. Mich.-Rice), Armed Forces (Houston-Air Force), , Insight (Kansas-Minnesota), Liberty (Kentucky-E. Carolina) [Kentucky being 6-6 and E. Carolina being from the conference USA hurt this bowl’s tier at 15 combined wins], and International (Buffalo-UConn)
Second Tier:
Las Vegas (BYU-Arizona), Poinsettia (Boise St.-TCU), Meineke Car Care (WVU-UNC), Champs Sports (Wisconsin-FSU), Emerald (Miami-Cal), Alamo (Missouri-Northwestern), Holiday (Oklahoma St.-Oregon), Sun (Oregon St.-Pittsburgh), Music City (Boston College-Vanderbilt) [This is the biggest one I was teetering with at 15 wins combined pre-bowl, but this game was very interesting to me with the ACC&SEC match up and it being Vandy's first bowl in a long time.] Chick-fil-a (LSU-Georgia Tech), Outback (South Carolina-Iowa), Capitol One (UGA-Mich. St.), Gator (Nebraska-Clemson), Cotton (Ole Miss-Texas Tech), GMAC (Ball St.-Tulsa) [I'm tempted to put the GMAC lower, but their records are too good to pass up.], and finally the Orange Bowl (Cincinnati-Virginia Tech)
I had to put the Orange bowl in the 2nd tier because it was such a bad BCS game. It’s almost like the BCS decision makers just lumped these two ugly-ducklings together because they had no other place to go except for the “Outcast BCS Bowl.” I could put the Orange Bowl in the BCS section, but I wouldn’t like it. Did you see the crowd for that game too? It wasn't even half capacity.
BCS:
Rose (Penn St.-USC), Sugar (Utah-Alabama), and Fiesta (Ohio St.-Texas)
National Title:
BCS title game(Florida-Oklahoma)
As of 1/3/09 at noon, the conferences stack up like this (with potential win points in parentheses but one point will be awarded for losing anyways):
- SEC - 16 (5)
- ACC and Pac 10 tied - 16
- [ACC and Pac 10]
- Big 12 - 10 (4,5)
- Mountain West - 10
- Big East - 9 (2)
- Big 10 - 8 (4) [Iowa was the Big 10's saving grace.]
- Conference USA - 8 (2)
- Sun Belt and WAC tied - 5
- [Sun Belt and WAC]
- MAC - 4 (2,2) [Poor ol' MAC is winless right now, but they have 2 more chances.]
- Independents - 4
Let me know if it needs any tweaking before the finalized version comes out.
Cintia Dicker
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Comments (9) Add A Comment
Let me know if you disagree with any of the bowls being in the wrong tier or any criticism.
How 'bout 'em
Marietta, GA
Total Comments (2080)
PAC-10 won all its bowl games. It should get at least some bonus points for that. Maybe not first place but at least second place worth of points.
chilledcactus
Total Comments (3)
Nah, the point of the exercise was to factor in bowl quality wins and bowl games played for each conference. Winning more quality bowl games should reward more than having a good winning percent. Isn't it better to win 5 of 7 bowl games than 3 of 3? I think so.
Of course the Pac 10 played 4 second tier bowl games and 1 BCS game and won them all, but they sent 5 teams to the bowl games where the SEC sent 8 and the ACC sent 10. The ACC won one less than the Pac 10, but that is why they are tied: they sent twice as many teams making the ACC much more vulnerable to losing. I don't like that "Bowl Challenge" they do on ESPN b/c they only use win percent when it is much harder to win all of one conference's bowls when there are more teams sent. It's almost like they're looking down on sending a lot of teams from one conference to the bowl games when that should be a good thing to have that many quality teams in the same conference.
How 'bout 'em
Marietta, GA
Total Comments (2080)
I'm actually thinking about tweaking the formula to have points awarded more on the scale of the bowl. Like 1 point for losing a 3rd tier bowl, and 3 points for winning. 2 points for losing a 2nd tier bowl, and 4 point for winning the second tier bowl. 3 points for losing a BCS bowl, and 5 points for winning a BCS bowl. 4 points for losing the NC, and 6 points for winning the NC.
I'll see how both come out.
How 'bout 'em
Marietta, GA
Total Comments (2080)
I think everything is pretty accurate except the over-representation from the ACC skews their results. I'm a Pac-10 guy and agree that just because you won all your games doesn't mean you are the best conference. I could tweak any conferences matchups slightly (switch around tier 2 teams for better matchups) and give any conference all wins or no wins.
If this were a usual year, where UCLA and Stanford were at the bottom of the Pac-10, then I'd say the Pac were the best, but Washington and Washington State are embarrassingly bad all of a sudden. They make the Iowa States of the world look like powerhouses.
stewbacca
Total Comments (54)
This is true. The ACC wasn't better than the Pac 10 for send twice as many bowl teams b/c all of their teams were pretty mediocre and allowed for more bowl teams.
I'll probably put the results of the first equation, my aforementionned equation in the comments, and an equation only for winning bowl teams. I think that'd be the fairest way to do it: represent all sides.
How 'bout 'em
Marietta, GA
Total Comments (2080)
if you want to replace a bowl with the orange bowl (#19 VS #12) you can replace it with the poinsettia bowl (#11 VS #9) it was a much better game with much better teams.
playoffsforbcs
Salt Lake City , UT
Total Comments (6)
I just watched the dirty Birds lose to a flawed NFL playoff format (division winner getting homefield over team with more Ws). Hopefully Oklahoma getting waxed will clear up the perceptions of that team and the rest of the largely unproven Big XII. Just put the SEC champ with USC and we'll be set..I guess you cant do that when GT goes undefeated..so
Deep South Sider
Atl, GA
Total Comments (1069)
I don't have to replace that BCS game with another. that was a good game but there were also many good match-ups as well. Poinsettia bowl is still a second tier bowl game b/c it was still two teams from the mid-majors (which might carry more weight now that Utah beat a legit Bama team).
How 'bout 'em
Marietta, GA
Total Comments (2080)
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