Posted by GreggS

Underground Resume Ranking Report – Week 6

(Through the games of Oct. 4)

“Craig, you’re making noises over there.”

This week’s rankings are brought to you by our generous sponsors:
Craig James’ unexplainable odd noises
The Wannstache’s coaching lifeline
Spitgate

Dropped: Connecticut, South Florida, Auburn, Virginia Tech

Just Missed: TCU, Connecticut, Illinois, Florida, Virginia Tech, Oregon, Oregon State

Comments, Concerns, and General Shenanigans

Thursdays are for losing
Like last year’s unlucky #2 ranking, this year it seems to be dangerous to be a favorite playing on a Thursday night. Break out the conspiracies that ESPN is paying teams to give them compelling games. South Carolina, Rutgers, Kansas State, USC, and now South Florida, have all lost on Thursday night this season. Add in Oregon State almost pulling off two in a row this week and it looks like we’ve got a clear trend. Is Wake Forest the next to go down?

Oddities and Eccentricities
We’re finally getting enough accumulated data that the rankings are starting to look pretty respectable. Northwestern is still up there, although they dropped a few spots with a bye. Minnesota somehow snuck into the bottom of the ranking. Granted, they are 5-1, but their mathematical best win is against Bowling Green. They travel to Illinois this weekend, so a win there (which won’t happen) would validate the current ranking.

Racking up the mileage
The biggest mover by a landslide this week is Missouri after their absolute shellacking of Nebraska and the ensuing playground-style name calling between Chase Daniels and Bo Pelini. Speaking of that game, we already know someone’s going to call us out on Nebraska moving up one spot. We covered some of it last week when Georgia moved up after losing, but we’ll say it again: look at the entire season’s resume, not just the results from last week.

Conference Wars
There were only two moves this week in the conference rankings. The ACC moved ahead of the Pac 10, mostly due to the black hole of football that is the state of Washington. Also, the Mountain West Conference has finally relinquished their spot in the middle of the BCS conferences. The conference still boasts three very good teams in Utah, BYU, and TCU, but the rest of the conference is starting to weigh them down too much.

Bottom of the Barrel
Speaking of the state of Washington, we felt it would be interesting to look at who ranks at the bottom of the FBS with the UR3 formula. Washington and North Texas share the bottom spot by default for failing to schedule a cupcake easy enough to pick up a win. After that, we get in order from the bottom-up: Idaho, UL-Monroe, UAB, Kent State, and Ohio University.

That’s it for this week. Happy weekending!

Underground Resume Ranking – Week 5

Dropped: Florida, Wisconsin, UCLA, Colorado, Fresno State, Georgia Tech, UNLV

Just Missed: Oregon, Missouri, Oregon State, TCU, Duke, Fresno State, Florida

Comments, Concerns, and General Shenanigans

Adventures in Wack-Balloteering
Does anyone want to win the national championship? Realllllly? You could’ve fooled us this past weekend with USC, Florida, Wisconsin, Wake Forest, and Georgia all losing. Our guess is that they all decided to play a practical joke on us to make our job hard. The good news is that, five weeks into the season, the rankings are starting to make a bit more sense, even with the attempts of the aforementioned teams to screw with us. There are still a couple strange ones in the rankings, but slowly things are starting to look clearer.

Oddities and Eccentricities
At least UCLA is gone. This week’s oddball is probably Northwestern, but for a different reason than UCLA was last week. Northwestern has certainly earned the ranking, and not through a loophole in the formula, but really? Northwestern? They’ve beaten Duke and Iowa, but we’re still not sure how that ranks the Wildcats so high. They’re off this weekend, which unfortunately means they’ll stay in the rankings for another week.

Racking up the mileage
The biggest positive mover of the week is Texas, after their win over Arkansas. It’s not the most impressive of wins, considering Oklahoma thoroughly dominated a very good TCU team and Alabama led Georgia by 31 at the half IN ATHENS. The important thing to remember is that these rankings are relative, so even though Bama only gained 6 spots, a) they couldn’t have gained any more, and b) their rating dropped a fairly substantial 12 points. Other winners this week include Northwestern and Penn State, who both won moderately valuable conference wins, and South Florida, whose win over NC State somehow vaulted them into 13th from outside the top 25 last week.

Conference Wars
Overall there’s not too much change in the conference rankings this week. The Big 10 jumped up to 2nd, but we’re 100% sure that’s due to conference play beginning. The Mountain West Conference is starting to fall, probably for the same reason.

Loophole Watch
Washington’s the only team left that exploited the loophole, sitting in approximately the 7th spot. Somehow a loss to Stanford wasn’t enough to kick them out for good, but it’s probably good enough to spell the end of Ty Willingham’s tenure at the helm.

Underground Resume Ranking Report – Week 4

“It’s mass confusion down here. Just a mess.”
This week’s rankings brought to you by the ghost of Bill Stewart’s coaching career.

Dropped: East Carolina, Oregon, South Florida, North Carolina, Minnesota, Southern Miss

Just Missed: Minnesota, Oregon, Oklahoma State, Texas Tech, South Florida, Kentucky

Comments, Concerns, and General Shenanigans

Mass confusion?
Yeah, the rankings are still a bit of a mess, but they’re slowly working themselves out.  There’s much less movement going on this week and once the major conference play begins, there will even less crazy fluctuations.

His Coachness can even charm a computer
We’re sure the first thing you noticed is the very conspicuous presence of UCLA in 6th.  No, it’s not a typo. No, we don’t believe UCLA has the 6th best resume in the nation.  Yes, UCLA really did earn that rating.  How?  Strength of schedule.  Exhibit A: the win over Tennessee.  Exhibit B: losses to BYU and Arizona.  This gives them roughly the 3rd toughest schedule to date in FBS football (more on that later).  This rating won’t last, however.  A loss against Fresno State this week (again, UCLA has a very tough schedule) will raise their rating to somewhere between 110 and 120, depending on other results.  If UCLA wins, they’ll maintain about the same rating.  Don’t worry; if UCLA is emphatically not a good team, the system will work it out as more games get played.