Blue Dawg's Weekly Sagarin Thread 2016

[PawDawg]

84th? This is ridiculous.

I hope Skip Holtz makes a point to tell his football team that they are ranked 84th (out of 129 teams?) by Sagarin. That's NO RESPECT! And then I hope he gives them a speech like this:

"Did you come to LA Tech to be ranked 84th?"
"Are you proud to be 84th?"

"For those of you keeping count, that means you are ranked in the bottom 35%."
"The bottom 35% in anything is typically considered a failure."

"Are you a failure?"

"Well, you have a chance tonight to go out there and change EVERYTHING!"
"In one 3-hour game, you can flip the switch from "failure" to "success"."

"Beat Texas Tech tonight, and they won't be ranking you 84th anymore."

It's Sagarin. You don't need to win to move up. You need to play non-Jr High teams.

[Blue Dawg]

It's Sagarin. You don't need to win to move up. You need to play non-Jr High teams.

I read an interesting article only d80 would care about, about how Wales in soccer hacked the FIFA ranking system and chose opponents that would give them optimum seeding in the tournaments.

Using this weeks rankings, the average rank of our OOC is 100.

The average rank of our conference opponents is 117.

I agree that we need to stop playing bottom dweller OOCs. Arkansas and Texas Tech were good gets, even if Tommy did get run in circles from LR. SC St was a fail scheduling wise, but not that anyone but Sagarin reads past "FCS." But the MAJOR problem is that of the 8 conference opponents we play this year, 3 of them are ranked BELOW 128, and 2 of the rest are still ranked BELOW 120!

That's why I don't get (as) upset when pure analytics ranks us so low. Half our conference SUCKS. Can't blame Jeff Sagarin for that.

[PawDawg]

Arkansas and Texas Tech were good gets, even if Tommy did get run in circles from LR..

Our AD didn't get Arkansas. He moved the game for some reason, but BVDV got the original contract. BVDV also had us a game with A&M instead of Texas Tech. Not a good get if you consider that we will be almost upside down on the financial dealings with both A&M and Texas Tech. It's a shame our beat writer is bad at math and can't understand the concept of addition and subtraction.

[Bearpaw]

We actually dropped a little this week. I don't know if it was due to poor performance (we should have beaten them by about a touchdown more) or factors beyond our control.

	Last Week	This Week
Sag Rank	81	84
Sag Rating	67.51	66.30
SOS Rank	27	114
SOS Rating	82.16	58.50
Pred W-L	7-5	7-5

It think it's the SOS drop from 27 to 114. WKU, MTSU, TT, UTEP, and the bottom of CUSA losing this week really hurt us.

[Bearpaw]

We actually dropped a little this week. I don't know if it was due to poor performance (we should have beaten them by about a touchdown more) or factors beyond our control.

	Last Week	This Week
Sag Rank	81	84
Sag Rating	67.51	66.30
SOS Rank	27	114
SOS Rating	82.16	58.50
Pred W-L	7-5	7-5

Home advantage for Week 3 is 2.61.

H/A	Rk	Team	Sag	Fav	W/L	+/-	Act
@	30	Ark		-1.00			L
	212	SCSt		29.00			W
@	37	TT	76.46	-11.16	L	0.07
@	80	MTSU	66.65	-1.35	L	1.91
	123	UTEP	55.88	14.64	W	-0.28
	54	WKU	73.72	-3.20	L	-2.90
@	119	MASS	57.84	7.46	W	-1.18
@	163	FIU	47.24	18.06	W	1.72
	128	Rice	54.49	16.03	W	-1.78
@	157	UNT	49.09	16.21	W	-3.97
	151	UTSA	50.03	20.49	W	-1.52
@	77	USM	67.84	-2.54	L	0.56

Rk	C-USA
54	Western Kentucky
66	Marshall
77	Southern Miss
80	Middle Tennessee
84	Louisiana Tech
122	Florida Atlantic
123	UTEP
128	Rice
151	UTSA
157	North Texas
163	Fla. International
170	North Texas

BTW, are you omitting UNCC and ODU on purpose?

[Blue Dawg]

BTW, are you omitting UNCC and ODU on purpose?

Ah! I knew something didn't look right. Thanks.

#141 ODU
#182 Charlotte

[Champ967]

It's Sagarin. You don't need to win to move up. You need to play non-Jr High teams.

This.

A 1-point loss to $ec is better for our ranking than a 4 touchdown romp over a MEAC team.

(I guess it's possible that Ark could nosedive, and SCST could win out and make a good run in the FCS playoffs. In which case, they'd probably be a wash.)

[johnnylightnin]

Ah! I knew something didn't look right. Thanks.

#141 ODU
#182 Charlotte

Is UNT listed twice?

[Cool Hand Clyde]

(I guess it's possible that Ark could nosedive)

labg

[Blue Dawg]

I found an error in the code I use to scrape Sagarin and do my math for me that was not finding ODU and UNT. Should be fixed now.

Rk	C-USA
54	Western Kentucky
66	Marshall
77	Southern Miss
80	Middle Tennessee
84	Louisiana Tech
122	Florida Atlantic
123	UTEP
128	Rice
141	Old Dominion
151	UTSA
157	North Texas
163	Fla. International
182	Charlotte

Our conference overall average is 117.5. Pretty atrocious.
Our OOC average is 99.5.
Our conference opponent average is 116.6.
It's obvious where the problem lies, at least as far as our Sagarin ranking is concerned.

[johnnylightnin]

I found an error in the code I use to scrape Sagarin and do my math for me that was not finding ODU and UNT. Should be fixed now.

Rk	C-USA
54	Western Kentucky
66	Marshall
77	Southern Miss
80	Middle Tennessee
84	Louisiana Tech
122	Florida Atlantic
123	UTEP
128	Rice
141	Old Dominion
151	UTSA
157	North Texas
163	Fla. International
182	Charlotte

Our conference overall average is 117.5. Pretty atrocious.
Our OOC average is 99.5.
Our conference opponent average is 116.6.
It's obvious where the problem lies, at least as far as our Sagarin ranking is concerned.

Thanks so much for posting and maintaining this thread.

[Blue Dawg]

Thanks so much for posting and maintaining this thread.

Any excuse I can get to play with numbers and not do real work.

[Blue Dawg]

	Last Week	This Week
Sag Rank	84	79
Sag Rating	66.30	66.75
SOS Rank	114	34
SOS Rating	58.50	72.18
Pred W-L	7-5	7-5

Home advantage for Week 4 is 2.70.

H/A	Rk	Team	Sag	Fav	W/L	+/-	Act
@	30	Ark		-1.00			L
	212	SCSt		29.00			W
@	37	TT		-14.00			L
@	74	MTSU	67.98	-3.93	L	-0.97
	152	UTEP	49.52	19.93	W	6.90
	60	WKU	71.77	-2.32	L	2.49
@	123	MASS	55.72	8.33	W	2.48
@	165	FIU	47.78	16.27	W	-0.18
	127	Rice	55.15	14.30	W	-0.12
@	157	UNT	49.34	14.71	W	0.11
	143	UTSA	51.99	17.46	W	-1.42
@	81	USM	65.54	-1.49	L	2.66

Rk	C-USA
60	Western Kentucky
74	Middle Tennessee
79	Louisiana Tech
81	Southern Miss
94	Marshall
127	Rice
136	Florida Atlantic
140	Old Dominion
143	UTSA
152	UTEP
157	North Texas
165	Fla. International
190	Charlotte

We actually moved up this week. Thank you, Arkansas! They are helping us out more than we are ourselves.

C-USA as a whole continues to get worse. Our conference average rank is 122.9.

[PawDawg]

We actually moved up this week. Thank you, Arkansas! They are helping us out more than we are ourselves.



Sagarin now shows us as 8-4: the new win comes from USM. WKU is also getting pretty close to the line as well. I remain unconvinced, and think a 7-5 season is probably our most likely final tally.

Playing Texas Tech helped a bunch too. Even if we win next week at Middle we will only move up a few more spots. Winning the next week vs. UTEP will do nothing. We may move down with that win. I don't trust the Sagarin predictor until very late in the season when the computers have had a chance to evaluate more numbers.

[Blue Dawg]

Playing Texas Tech helped a bunch too. Even if we win next week at Middle we will only move up a few more spots. Winning the next week vs. UTEP will do nothing. We may move down with that win. I don't trust the Sagarin predictor until very late in the season when the computers have had a chance to evaluate more numbers.

Definitely true. Most computer polls fluctuate pretty wildly early on, unless they're based on either last year's numbers or subjective criteria like A-5 status.