Sunday
Sep302007
This Week's Rankings: Who'd A Thunk?
Sunday, September 30, 2007 at 05:51PM - LSU - First time at No. 1 since the Billy Cannon years, no?
- USC - Arguably the best team in the country
- California - !
- Ohio State - Too high
- Wisconsin - Way too high
- South Florida - ! ! !
- Boston College - !
- Kentucky - ! ! !
- Florida - Too low
- Oklahoma
Reader Comments (22)
See NCAA Rules Manual (.PDF), pages 103-106. The only permissible contact is within one yard of the neutral zone immediately after the snap.
http://www.ncaa.org/library/rules/2007/2007_football_rules.pdf
http://www.bcsfanpoll.com/
Well, sure. I mean, they're #2, and the #2 team is pretty much always arguably the best team in the country. And they were very recently #1, and the #1 team is presumptively best team in the country. So you're really not saying much at all in that comment.
But the thing is, this week you also could have written:
"2. USC - arguably shouldn't be in the top 5."
or
"2. USC - lucky they only dropped one spot"
or
"2. USC - only here because the mind rebels to greatly against Cal, USF, and Kentucky in the 2-spot instead."
USC didn't look like the best team, or the second best team, in the country, on Saturday. They didn't look like the best or second best team in the Pac-10.
To clarify, I don't have any problem with the top 5 in the AP or Coaches Poll, but pointing out that USC is "arguably the best team in the country" this week is ill-timed at least and pretty much meaningless,
They completely shut down the UW offense, had a handful of bogus penalties called against them for huge chunks of yards (many of the other penalties were quite legit, mind you), saw their quarterback play his first really bad game of his career, did all of this up in the rain/wind/cold of a road setting and the Pac-10's second noisiest stadium, kept committing errors and penalties, lost two of their three best linemen early on, and still were in a position to cruise at 24-14 in the third quarter before another round of disaster struck.
I've seen plenty of good and great teams wilt when all that crap happens. USC just kept playing, won the game and gets to live another day. A lot of that was uncharacteristic but if you look at them, they're running the ball quite well, their defense is superb in spite of the backup's backup starting at two spots, they've handled two road challenges, things aren't so bad for them.
That was a 10 point comfortable game (with the way the USC defense was playing) very late before just the weirdness of that kick return and the blocked punt. I was laughing at that point, everything that could go wrong *did* for USC.
It's amazing too because they keep playing Chauncey Washington over Stafon Johnson. Johnson's amazing, that guy won't be on the bench in critical situations for much longer. When that happens I think we'll see their offense truly balanced for the first time since 2005. Scary.
Penalties are part of the game - committing a lot can be anomalous or can be typical, but either way, they count. We can't say "USC played well but committed penalties." Instead, "USC played badly; specifically, they committed a lot of penalties." The 4 personal fouls, interference with the return, 2 PIs, several holdings, several false starts were all poor play, evidence (though not conclusive) of a bad team. In the case of the Trojans, other (ample) evidence suggests they're good, but penalties still count.
RE: injuries. (1) Don't you do a power poll? As in, who would beat whom today / next week? Then you rank the team you see in front of you. (2) Didn't UW have some injuries too? I definitely saw some Huskies limp off the field. The Trojan backups definitely stepped up, but pointing to injuries is an excuse - the backups were expected to be able to step up.
RE: "saw their quarterback play his first really bad game of his career" - where Booty goes, so goes the fate of the Trojans. Locker played one of his worst games too. Poor QB play, especially against unimposing UW defense, should count against a team.
"That was a 10 point comfortable game . . ." *FALSE* This game was comfortable for *4 minutes and 4 seconds*. ONLY after USC's final field goal was the game comfortable. Yes, the last Husky TD was in garbage time. Had that interception not been (correctly) reviewed and reversed, I wouldn't have trusted USC's defense to keep UW from tying. I won't say a tying score was likely, but it wouldn't have been surprising at that point either.
Again, given the way polls work, I'm not shocked or even upset by USC holding the #2 spot. But this Saturday simply wasn't good evidence that the Trojans are the best team in the country.
Washington's longest drive on the day was 67 yards on the first drive before they were intercepted. Once they went without the script they did absolutely nothing.
After that? 34 yards was their second longest drive. Their scoring drives were 14, 22 and 9 yards, set up by a blocked punt, a long kick return and horrendous PI calls. That was a perfect storm of USC foolishness and USC still won.
Washington had to count on a host of USC interceptions, fumbles, punts, long returns, penalties, injuries, home field, weather and everything else and still came close to getting blown out when USC asserted itself in the third quarter.
That's a hell of a football team, we've all seen enough of USC over the years to know they won't make a quarter of those mistakes at any other time this year or any year, that was incredibly uncharacteristic. They'll get challenged again somewhere, it happens every year, but so does everyone else.
I think Florida would give them fits, maybe West Virginia just because of the unusual offense and how it configures against USC's defensive scheme, but I think LSU would lose to USC right now, Oregon would lose, Cal should be a close game but USC looks to have a decent edge there.
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?&brand=null&videoId=3045411&n8pe6c=3
Actually a lot of people are saying the same if you scan through the Pundit Roundup going up tomorrow.
Close to blown out? Really? What game did you watch?
From the end of the 3rd quarter to the middle of the 4th, USC went 3-and-out on three consecutive drives. The only points the Trojans put on the board after their TD in the 3rd was the field goal late in the 4th - approximately 14 minutes later. USC took 9 plays to go 27 yards on that drive; the only reason it resulted in points was that the Huskies muffed the previous punt and gave the Trojans an extremely short field. On top of that, the drive should have ended in a touchback, because UW failed to make an *EASY* interception.
Even though the storyline of the day was "USC beats itself," the fact is that in the end, the only reason USC was able to put the game away was that WASHINGTON beat itself. USC's errors kept the game close when it was otherwise playing well enough to pull away; UW's errors gave the game away when it was otherwise playing well enough to keep it close.
I never said that if UW had the ball on their own 20 with 4 minutes to go that I would have expected them to tie it up. Yet neither would Trojan fans have been comfortable at that point, no matter how much they trusted the defense. But for both of those critical Husky mistakes in the 4th, momentum had completely shifted, the Trojan defense would have had less time to rest, and the Huskies would have been significantly winning the field position battle.
Quickly on the other points:
- Disagree that the PI calls were bad. The threshold for ignoring PI because the pass was uncatchable is consistently high: the ball has to be ridiculously impossible to catch to be ruled uncatchable.
- RE: the pundits in the video. I didn't say you were all alone in touting USC this week, but even still, pointing to mainstream sports pundits for support doesn't really say much. A look around the blogpoll probably supports my side just as much. I didn't hear any argument in the video that I didn't already address.
- I agree that a win over UW is more impressive than a win over Tulane. And I could absolutely entertain the argument that LSU didn't look dominant in their game (I didn't see any of it, but that's certainly what the recap / highlights / etc show). So maybe you're making a 2-part argument for USC looking like "best team in the country" - (1) none of the traditional, big name programs (LSU, obviously OK or Florida) looked better; and (2) the teams that *did* look better (Cal, UK, USF, Ohio State?) are hard to trust given their debutante status.
At best, all that leads us to this tentative conclusion: perhaps there aren't any teams you feel comfortable declaring better than USC, given their the history of their programs. And given USC's recent history, you're willing to write off their mistakes on Saturday. But based on how they actually played this weekend, I still find it pretty hard to say they look like the best team in the country.
Their schedule after Notre Dame is similar to USC's after Notre Dame, and both will lose at least two games after they play the Irish.
I would say that the teams who have accomplished the most so far this season, in order of accomplishments, are USF, Kentucky, LSU, and California. Now, if you want to throw in some ranking of what you THINK certain teams are CAPABLE of doing, then, yeah, USC is up there, I guess, but I wouldn't say that they have been able to show on the field that they should be in the Top 5, as of yet. In terms of accomplishments this season, USC has nothing more to say for themselves than Wisconsin does.
Ohio State and Cincinnati have obliterated their opponents, but haven't played quite as tough of schedules so far as those other 4 I mentioned above. You might still put them up there in the top 5 like people want to put USC.
Most people don't have faith that Cincinnati is actually any good, because of past years, and name rec., so we'll see about them.
Arizona St has been impressive so far. Oklahoma had also been impressive, prior to this week, but since we really don't know how good Miami is, because we don't even know how good Texas A&M really is, it really is way too early to tell. My guess is that teams are really going to beat each other up this season, and it is going to be a tough call to accurately rank'em.
USC may burn out at the end of the season. Again, have you taken a look at their schedule after Notre Dame?
That team in my estimation was somewhere from the 2nd to 4th best team in the country and this group is a marked improvement over them.
Games like Washington are going to happen, all you can judge a team on when crap like that happens is how they performed.
And, yes, Washington was close to being blown out. Did you really think after watching USC's offense those first three quarters, that they wouldn't score again? At the end of the third quarter I started flipping channels even more than before, USC looked like it was going to score 3 more times the way they were moving the ball and playing defense which would have made it 45-14.
Instead, calamity. You're basically judging USC on a single quarter and saying no, not even close. I'm looking at the big picture with them, looking at what they essentially are, and I realize that the odds are incredibly slim they'll ever have that kind of turnover/penalty spree again. To boot, some of the penalties were ridiculous and led directly to UW touchdowns. They got out of Dodge with a win but none of what they essentially are, changed. That's a fast, athletic team with a very good quarterback that can run the ball, has an above average offensive line and run game, stops the run, keeps everything in front of them on defense, and is improving week by week.
I rank on what teams are, what they do.
B.C. is playing solid defense (sometimes fantastic), their quarterback has been lights out, that's an above average team right now, hard to knock them. I'm usually quite skeptical of the Eagles but for at least this year the coaching change has worked out well.
We'll see if Jagodzinski is a Coker lite or what, doing well with another man's personnel, but for now that team is forcing turnovers, stopping the run, has some stars like JoLonn Dunbar playing out of their minds, they're able to run and pass equally well and their quarterback is good enough to make most of the calls at the line which is more than can be said for a majority of D-1 QB's.
When you've got an NFL type quarterback running a college offense, by default you're just going to beat a lot of people so long as you have a semblance of a defense.
Regarding USC almost blowing out UW: that still makes no sense at all. Although USC was able to run the ball on UW all night, they never, ever showed signs of pulling away. At the end of 3 quarters, I wasn't watching an offensive juggernaut; I was watching a Trojan squad that consistently committed errors that killed drives. There was no indication they were going to stop doing that. In fact, USC finished that quarter with its worst series of the game to that point, a 3-and-out only eclipsed by the two 3-and-outs that followed.
Framed optimistically, you could say that the Trojans were in position to go up by 17 in the third quarter. Not that they actually came close to doing so - just that they had the ball while up by 10.
UW never trailed by more than 10, and USC never significantly threatened to increase that lead. That's just not "close to being blown out."
Now, you could, instead, aspire to be more like the human polls, in other words, to subjectively drop and raise teams based on their name recognition and other biases. And you could also try to determine how good you HOPE that a team is, regardless of their wins and losses, like you do with Pac-10 teams, but I think that that is a disingenuous effort.
Ultimately, all you can do is look at whatever your formula of SOS is, look at whatever performance statistics are worthwhile to you, and. yes, choose all this, all your beta values based on subjectivity. However, at least you will have yourself being systematically subjective.
If you do that, if you create your own computer poll, you usually can't tweak the values enough to where the Kentucky's, the USF's, and the Cincinnati's all drop out of your Top 25, and still have a credible poll, where there aren't any 2-3 teams, because the computer forces you to apply your own criteria consistently.
I'm not evaluating on hopes and feelings, I spend WAY too much time on Saturday watching as many teams as possible to be trying to project anything onto anyone.
Honest to goodness what I saw out of USC on Saturday was a great performance on both sides of the ball and a boatload of mistakes, many of them driven by bad calls and mitigated by a road/rain/wind/cold situation. That is a hell of a football team and it isn't that hard to say they're the best team in the country. The only other team I can find to argue with that is LSU.
Computers have an incredible amount of error. They don't evaluate wind and rain and artificial turf and travel and bad calls that lead directly to touchdowns. All they do is go team X just gave up 7 points. I can sit and home and go "that's bogus" and realize that team X is still playing a great game and looks like a fantastic team.
Where am I projecting Pac-10 teams? I'm still trying to figure out UCLA, still trying to figure out ASU. I have seen enough from Oregon and Cal to know they're both solid teams so far, shaky along the defensive line but also among the most explosive on the offensive side of the ball. Now I'm a little more skeptical of Oregon with their recent collapses so I'm watching for that (something a computer cannot do). I'm watching for the inevitable blunder or two from a Les Miles team. I've been skeptical of USC in the early going giving them the lightest of No. 1 rankings but it looks like that running game is coming through and if Booty shakes off his rust I think we're looking at a clear-cut No. 1 but for now its close with LSU which is having some issues along the offensive line and with Flynn not playing his best whether that's injury or just a guy with all of five career starts in five seasons we'll know more as the season rolls through.
At the end of the year if those things don't happen, however, I can easily adjust for that. A computer is not going to be happy with Florida losing to Auburn, but me sitting at home knows Auburn has the Gators' number. Their defense is a great fit against Florida as it's generally among the SEC's smallest but fastest groups which is a great matchup against the Florida attack. Florida was going to have problems moving the ball all night. At the same time, a pounding, powerful yet speedy attack like Arkansas we now know is a good counter to the smaller, less physical Auburn defense. A computer doesn't account for that. It cannot factor in how big of a up/down team Auburn is and how they can look like crap in two games and then play lights-out after looking like crap and getting tired of hearing about it and take it out on whoever's next (both times, Florida - bad timing Gators!).
I'm not going to kill the Gators in my rankings over that, it's obvious that's a great football team with a shaky but improving defense and one of the game's better competitors in Tebow who neutralizes a lot of things on the field. I can't just sit there and go "Auburn 2-2, lost to Miss St., lost to Florida beats 4-0 Florida, Gators must suck". NO.
Auburn is an above average team with some huge weaknesses particularly shaky quarterback play, inconsistency with its scheme and a lot of new faces on defense and the offensive line. They cannot compete nationally, but they have just enough and run the right looks to do what they did to Florida and maybe someone else. Auburn's not going to soar in my rankings because of that, we know what they are and what they aren't. But the Gators aren't going to drop like a rock, either. We have an idea of what they are.
A computer does a terrible job of accounting for all that. I'm being as fair as possible, but everyone sees things differently which is why my rankings aren't the same as any other AP voters', aren't the same as Heisman Pundit or Baseball Savant two people who tend to see things similarly to how I do, etc. That's rankings though.