2008 College Football - Ranking the Conferences
So I'm trying to figure out which is the toughest conference based on my rankings. The presumption was, that the Big 12 was the toughest followed by the SEC and Big 10, with the Mountain West coming in after that. I decided to do some math to see what would happen. I came up with 3 different formulas which produced varying results.
The first formula
Sum of the Ranking percentage of the team divided by # of teams in the conference. so the Formula winning percentage that I post is what is used in this formula. Here are the results after last weeks games.
Conference F1 WP
Atlantic Coast Conference 0.651699726
Big 12 Conference 0.651040868
Southeastern Conference 0.650627751
Big East Conference 0.637939143
Big 10 Conference 0.616289968
Mountain West Conference 0.59090955
Pacific 10 Conference 0.469114652
Western Athletic Conference 0.442050934
Mid-American Conference 0.405699024
Conference USA 0.367022237
Sun Belt Conference 0.296733206
Seeing the ACC at the top made me think that something is not right, so I created an inverse ranking of the teams and summed up those rankings and divided by the number of teams. So Utah ranked #1 gets 120 points, Alabama at # 2 gets 119, and so on. Here are those results.
Conference RANK
Atlantic Coast Conference 78.33
Southeastern Conference 76.92
Big 12 Conference 75.33
Big East Conference 74.50
Big 10 Conference 71.27
Mountain West Conference 68.22
Pacific 10 Conference 54.60
Western Athletic Conference 50.00
Mid-American Conference 45.85
Conference USA 41.42
Sun Belt Conference 31.63
Once again the ACC is at the top
Finally, I assigned an arbitrary point value for the rank and added these up and divided by the number of teams. Here is the arbitrary point value
1 - 5 = 15 points
6 - 10 = 14 points
11 - 15 = 13 points
16 - 20 = 11 points
21 - 30 = 9 points
31 - 40 = 8 points
41 - 50 = 7 points
51 - 60 = 6 points
61 - 70 = 5 points
71 - 80 = 4 points
81 - 90 = 3 points
91 - 100 = 2 points
101 - 110 = 1 point
111 - 120 = 0 points
Here are the results
Conference PV
Big 12 Conference 8.25
Southeastern Conference 7.83
Atlantic Coast Conference 7.33
Mountain West Conference 7.22
Big 10 Conference 7.18
Big East Conference 7.00
Pacific 10 Conference 5.30
Western Athletic Conference 4.89
Mid-American Conference 4.38
Conference USA 3.75
Sun Belt Conference 2.63
In this one the Big 12 did come out on top, followed by the SEC, but then the ACC is right in there at 3rd. I'm not sure if any of these formulas would be accurate. If you think they are or have an idea how to improve them or have a different one altogether, please share.
I think you're selling the ACC short. While they have no top ranked teams, Duke may be the only turd in the conference and they're 4-7.
ReplyDeleteNC State, Virginia and Duke are the only teams with losing records. Duke is the only one w/o a victory over a ranked opponent.
The Big 12, by comparison, has 5 teams (of 12) with losing records and 6 of 12 w/o a victory over a ranked opponent.
By these measurements, it is easy to declare the ACC a "tougher conference" than the Big 12.