Last year Clemson performed above expectations in my mind, shocking midwesterners with a very talented season on both sides of the ball. I knew there be explosion in their offense, but in the passing game? I had no idea Cullen Harper would throw for 27 tds and i think it was six pics? thats some great production. Especially when you have James Davis and C.J. Spiller to take oppurtunities away. The defense was elite and staved off a lot of attacks that presented themselves last season.

Lucky for Clemson they lost very little this offseason, the most notable losses being Barry Richardson OT, 2nd round pick Phillip Merling DE. Almost everyone else returns. The offense will be explosive, they will probably average about 35 points a game and the defense will allow about 14. Not to mention the weak conference they play in, this season at least. Yes the ACC has Miami, FSU, and Virginia Tech, but aside from VT they won't be anything special. Look for Clemson to take the ACC title with ease. An early hurdle with Alabama at home could set them up for some name recognition and attention.

Schedule:

Alabama: W 24-21

The Citadel: W 56-7

NCST: 45-13

SCST: W 56-0

Maryland: W 31-17

at Wake Forest: W 30-27

Georgia Tech: W 20-7

at BC: W 21-7

at FSU: W 21-20

Duke: 38-10

at Virginia: L 17-28

South Carolina: W 34-28

ACC champions

I think anyone who wants to understand how I "work" will take every word of this outstanding quasi-effort  by Slate's Seth Stevenson to heart:

Stop resisting and embrace your procrastination. Don't agonize in front of a blank computer screen. Don't sit around for hours—intending to start your work any moment now—only to find that in the end you've accomplished zilch, save for ruining your own day.

Except for Guitar Hero (I only play NCAA Football these days), he has reached into my soul.

Hey Sunday Morning Quarterback,

Today is the big day. We've switched your community over to the new SB Nation sports blog platform. My name is Trei, and I'm here to help you get adjusted to the new home we've built for you. If you have questions or trouble with the new system, post a comment in this thread and myself or one of the team (lovitt, sixfoot6 or odacrem) will try to point you in the right direction.

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What Has Changed

SB Nation Network Accounts - the Big Change

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We want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate on all of our blogs, but we don't want to encourage everyone to start visiting rival team blogs and initiating flame wars. To maintain friendly communities we ask that you explicitly join each blog in order to participate. It's a two-click process, but it does means accepting each blog's community guidelines. Just as you join each blog individually, you can be banned on each blog individually.

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FanPosts (the Section Formerly Known as Diaries)

We changed their name. Why? Because we took this major upgrade as an opportunity to leave behind some vocabulary that never made much sense for a sports blog. SB Nation is the network of, by and for fans, and these are the blog posts we make. So we call them FanPosts. When you're at a bar telling someone to check out your online sports opinions, you don't have to suggest they read your diary.

FanPosts are displayed differently on the homepage - we include your avatar to give more credit for the time you spend writing great posts. The new post editor has a WYSIWYG view that provides easy formatting. It also auto-saves drafts so you don't have to worry about losing your work when you compose a post within the web browser. And you can now associate teams, players and games with your posts: these tools promote your FanPosts on our new team, player and game pages - across the entire network.

The new system does not work like the old diary editor. For example, in HTML mode the new editor doesn't auto-create a new paragraph from two line breaks. But it does offer a whole array of new features. Look for the blinking help button on the right side of the FanPost editor for quick tips, and take a look at our full guide to writing FanPosts on the new platform.

IMPORTANT - if you write your posts in Microsoft Word or some other off-line editor, you will get the most reliable behavior if you cut & paste your post into the HTML view of the FanPost editor. And if you do that, remember to wrap <p></p> tags around each paragraph so your text doesn't run together.

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This one is probably the most obvious change of all. Like other major websites working to improve readability for their audience, we've adopted a fixed-width layout optimized for the 1024 x 768 resolution used by the majority of Sunday Morning Quarterback and SB Nation network users. Use the switcher below the user menu if you prefer the wider layout designed for 1280 monitors. We've introduced a top navigation bar with quick links into old and new sections of the site. We also polished a few edges, made some things larger, others smaller and moved a few boxes here and there. More changes and adjustments to come.

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What's New

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FanShots

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Archives

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Network bar

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There are plenty more small changes and additions we've made, so please take a careful look around and explore this new system. We appreciate your patience and hope you'll help us improve the new platform for this and all the other SB Nation blogs.

And in case you missed it, you'll want to start by claiming your old blog accounts and creating a new SB Nation network account.

I was just thinking that with the commissioners rejecting any playoff proposal, I'd drop an idea I've been thinking about and seeing what people think of it.
I'm personally opposed to a playoff, since I enjoy the importance of the regular season as it is right now, but I do agree that there is a lot of difficulty in evaluating teams at the end of the year.  One of the big causes of this problem is that there really aren't enough out of conference games between top teams, for a number of reasons, and this deprives us of valuable information would could use to make these decisions.  The biggest and simplest reasons have to do with wanting easy wins and the financial incentive to play games at home against opponents who cannot demand a return game.  This causes a lot of BCS teams to schedule weak opponents from non-BCS conferences to pad their schedules.  We can't take away these incentives, but maybe we can offer an alternative.
I wonder what would happen if an auto-bid to the BCS was given to teams that beat 2 conference champions or won their conference and beat the champion of another conference.  Obviously, they would need to be ranked in the top 12, 14, or 16 or whatever, and that second part of the rule would only matter to mid-major programs because the BCS conferences champions already get an auto-bid.  The main point is that I think it would provide an huge financial incentive for top teams to start scheduling higher ranked opponents.  If a school could guarantee itself a BCS bid by playing out of conference games against teams that have the potential to win the their conferences, there would be a push towards these kinds of games.
Strong mid-major programs like Boise State, BYU, Fresno State, UCF, and TCU would be in bigger demand, since BCS teams would seek out teams that are likely to win their conferences.  That gives the smaller schools more bargaining power, and they can insist on home and home or 2 for 1 deals with the bigger schools.  Also, these strong mid-major teams would have a reason to play each other; if they can win their conference and beat another conference's champion, they have stronger argument for get into the BCS games, or maybe an automatic bid.
Since there are only a limited number of out of conference games that the non-BCS conference champs can play, and big schools won't be all that keen on having to go away to play games against them (although they probably now have to start doing so), the big schools would see more reason to play against each other.  Right now, the losses of big out of conference games outweigh the rewards.  A school like Wisconsin has no reason to schedule games against tough opponents if it's trying to get into the BCS, because either it wins the Big 10 championship or it's trying to win as many games as possible to get a high enough ranking.  Let's imagine that Ohio State wins the conference, but Wisconsin beats them heads up.  Now Wisconsin would want a game against an OOC team that won its conference.  It could either try to find a strong mid-major team, or it could try schedule a school like Missouri or Louisville in the hopes that that school wins its conference championship, and those schools would want the same from Wisconsin.
I think this idea would help to promote games between strong programs and teams and would help to correct the fundamental problem we have with evaluating teams now.  It would give us more information about how the individual school fares against a top team and how conferences as a whole stack up against each other.  It gives mid-majors a chance to build their programs up by playing against each other or demanding home games from large schools instead of always having to face a hostile environment.  I think this proposal works because it gives everyone a reason to play good games OOC; the money and publicity they earn from playing in a BCS game. Thoughts?

As the official bowl slotting freak around here, I couldn't resist.  With the announcement of 2 new bowls for 2008, what would have been the effects on the 2007 matchups if they'd existed?

Continue reading this post »

A visitor to the site today got here one of the fun ways: do a Google Image Search for a highfallutin' word like "anthropomorphism," and what comes up? Naturally, this:

Once again, god bless the Internet.

Here's a thought: Buckeye fans should be some of the most vocal playoff proponents.

Ohio State has gotten a bad rap lately, as SMQ has pointed out so eloquently on the main page. It has been to 3 of the past 6 BCS title games, and has one of the highest winning percentages of the decade.

However, thanks to two bad losses in the last two BCS title games, they're equated with the early '90s Buffalo Bills. You know who else has two bad losses at that level in the past two years? UCLA men's basketball. The Bruins lost badly to Florida in the past two Final Fours, but instead of being a national joke they're held up as an example of a great program. Sure, there's pressure on them to win it all this year, but no one is calling them the Bills.

The difference is that UCLA made its way to those bad losses via a playoff. Ohio State got voted in to the title games, and there were definite questions last year surrounding the team given the national negative perception of its conference. Plus, they basically backed into the contest because following a bad loss to Illinois they won a nondescript game over Michigan and watched the national carnage propel them back up.

If we had a playoff the last two years, it's entirely possible the Buckeyes could have lost without even making the title game. However, if they did make it there both years the public perception would be that they earned their way there, and they just happened to get caught in a bad matchup both times. It's also entirely possible that a playoff-forged matchup between the Buckeyes and Gators in 2006 would have made OSU take UF more seriously and everyone would be talking about 2 titles in 5 years instead of invoking Scott Norwood's team when talking about them.

Ohio State's fans should be in favor of a playoff for this very reason. Vocally so. After all, an 11-1 Ohio State team with only a road loss to USC would have a powerful case for going to the national title game in any year this decade, but if there's 2 other 11-1 teams I can't help but feel that people will vote OSU #3 based on perceptions made from the last two years. But, when opinion polls and beauty contests rule the postseason system, these are the things that could happen.

Stand up Buckeyes. It's time you made a real playoff push.

Disclosure: I am a Florida Gator, and even run Florida-centered blog.

I put this in the 'Diary' section because I've addressed in the main page several times already, but I'm still having a difficult time with the kneejerk reaction nationally and, for the most part, regionally against Jeff Bower's dismissal from Southern Miss after 14 straight winning seasons, four conference championships, etc. etc. This is what we can take from those opinions:

1) Bower's record at Southern Miss was very ordinary by the program's historical and contemporary standards.
2)  Southern Miss has suffered from steadily diminishing returns throughout the current decade.
3) Southern Miss has consistently underachieved according to national expectations and oddsmakers over the last eight years.
4) In a little more than two months, Larry Fedora delivered the single highest-rated recruit and in all likelihood the highest-rated overall recruiting class in school history.

Saurian Sagacity has up this week a quick look at the highest-rated classes by Rivals over the last four years. This is very similar to the quick and dirty look I put together last month, but includes mid-major rankings, which I did not. Cumulatively, Southern Miss ranks 55th nationally. That's best of any non-BCS team, and USM's cumulative point total, using Rivals' formula, is twice that of the second-best total in Conference USA (Central Florida). Among the teams that rank below Southern Miss in cumulative talent, in this survey's estimation:

• Kentucky
• South Florida
• BYU
• Wake Forest
• Boise State
• Hawaii
• Cincinnati

Kentucky and USF upset eventual top five, BCS-winning favorites and spent part of last season in the top ten, both finishing in or very near the final polls. BYU has won 16 straight Mountain West games and finished in the top 20 two years in a row. Wake Forest appeared in the Orange Bowl in 2006 and won nine games again last year. Boise State and Hawaii have had undefeated regular season and appeared in BCS bowls; Boise trounced USM in a joke of a game that wasn't competitive for a second back in September. Cincinnati, besides being a former C-USA underling that finished last season in the top 25, was the biggest favorite of the bowl season against the Eagles, so much so that a friend called to congratulate me that USM was still in the game in the third quarter.

The 'experts,' such as they are, think Southern Miss has at least comparable athleticism to each of these teams. Yet USM has lost three C-USA games each of the last four years and each time finished at least two games back of the conference champion in one of the weakest conferences in the country. It was the unanimous favorite to win the league last year and finished sixth, with a home loss on national television to Rice (97th in talent over the last four years, according to Rivals) for good measure. USM has not even sniffed the polls.

So why was a call for new blood such a damn mystery? Pay attention, people.

Once again, it's The Boy from Rock M Nation.  The amount of time between Parts Two and Three here was larger than I intended, but that's actually a good thing--I got sidetracked because somebody showed me a site where I can enter play-by-play for games about 4x or 5x faster.  Instead of 8-10 a week, I can now do 40-50.  So without the help of any volunteers, I should have all of 2007's games entered some time in late-April or early-May.  Hooray!  I still need volunteers, though, when it comes to playing with the data and seeing what becomes of it.  As always, e-mail me at BillConnelly1 @ gmail.com if you're interested.  Anyway, on to Part Three.

Continue reading this post »

SMQ's arguments in favor of a playoff in the debate with Kyle King are among the best I have ever read.  SMQ says everything I ever thought about the need and purpose of a playoff but had never been able to put it to words so well in my own debates with Kyle and others.  I cannot even begin to understand why anyone would oppose a playoff on the grounds that the best team may not lay claim to the label "champion" while touting opinion deciding who is the champion just because the champion can claim the unverifiable label of "best team" when identifying the best team has never been the purpose served by competition.

That said, I take issue with SMQ's concession that subjectivity is necessarily needed to determine playoff participants and seeds.  The fact that teams have dissimilar schedules does not preclude college football from determining the values of each team's season in a completely objective manner.  With objective rules, Resume A always beats Resume B given the exact same results.  However, with subjective rules, there is no way to know that a selector won't vote in favor of the same team even if they traded resumes with another.  In this instance and in many others, who wins the better seeds and final playoff berths has nothing to do with what actually occurred on the field of play.  

Take the objective rules I devised for this very purpose.  Ideally, teams would play an equal number of regular season games versus I-A competition only and their schools would be directly influenced by the rules when it comes to scheduling.  Yet, despite none those conditions existing, the results compared to the polls are very comparable.  During the past 30 years, the first place under the rules I devised has won or shared the mythical title 18 straight years, 23 of 24 years, and 26 of 30 years. On average, these rules and the AP have agreed on 3 of 4 top four teams, 6 of 8 top eight teams, 10 of 12 top twelve teams, and 14 of 16 top sixteen teams   The difference is that no one can dispute the results based on objective rules even if they have problems with the rules themselves whereas subjective rules define disputed as any team on the outside looking in can adopt any argument to justify their inclusion.  Even if there are reasons the same rules used by other sports to determine their playoff particpants and seeds are not practical for college football, it doesn't follow that all possible objective rules are impractical.  The rules I speak of here only need wins and losses and opponents' wins and losses to separate any two teams more than 99% percent of time.  Ultimately, where teams rank only comes down to results that occurred on the football field.

This year, my system and the AP agreed on 14 of the top 16 teams.  My system favored South Florida and BYU whereas the AP favored Tennessee and Clemson.  My system can tell everyone the exact difference between any two places and the least that needed to happen for any team to gain any desired ranking.  Other than more voters simply holding opinions favorable to USF and BYU, we have no idea what the least these teams needed to do to gain the pollsters' favor. In fact, despite USF owning a better record, opponents' record, and head-to-head win over Auburn, the Tigers actually finished the regular season ranked higher in the AP.  I don't claim the rules I advocate here won't produce politically incoorect results, but at least the rules explain the results.  There is nothing about polls that explains this result or even suggests pollsters put much thought into it.

Ultimately, the biggest problem I see when it comes to advocating objective rules is that so many are quick to dismiss any rules that produce any results that contradict their subjective values based on a different standard.  The idea that objective and subjective values are suppose to agree is absurd.  No one believes that beating the best and worst NFL teams are subjectively equal accomplishments, but no ever objects to those same results having equal objective values.  An athletic competition involving several games is really no different than an individual game.  The rules exist simply determine a winner.  Whether or not anyone would favor the same rules I do, the results only say that this team beats that team according to these particular rules. As an example, I can tell everyone that based on these rules, a 9-3 season versus 72-72 opponents always beats an 8-4 season versus 68-76 opponents.  Always.  Doesn't it make more sense to know who would win given all possible scenarios before a single game is played rather play all games then have a selection committee tell us who won via a vote influenced by as many standards as there are committee members in which no member could ever guarantee that they would value the same seasons more if posted by another team? As an example of this, earlier this year, after losing at home to Stanford, the Trojans remained ranked higher than an unbeaten South Florida team that had posted a road win versus Auburn.  My problem isn't that USC's resume at that point was valued more, but rather the fact that the same two teams would have ranked in the same order even if they traded resumes.  As such, USC wins not because of what happened on the field but rather because they are USC.  That is absurd.  The rules, whatever they may be, should tell us beforehand what makes for a better resume and reward the owner of said resume with a higher ranking rather than the name team with the better talent regardless of what actually occurs on the playing field.