College Football Morning: The Big Ten's Soft Underbelly

Why it helps to have some mediocre teams.

On the whole, the Big Ten’s newest additions should strengthen it more than the SEC’s, for the simple reason that the Big Ten added four prominent programs and the SEC added two. In college sports, strength is often judged by counting stats: How many teams did you send to the College Football Playoff? How many did you send to the NCAA Tournament? How often did your teams win it all?

Texas gives the SEC a boost in that last category—the Longhorns are probably closer to a football national title than Oregon, the closest Big Ten addition—but even there, the category is a wash. Over the next ten years, USC has the higher ceiling than Oklahoma, no matter how highly we think of the athletic department in Norman. That outweighs the Texas/Oregon edge. As for the first two categories? The Big Ten wins them. The Big Ten added good Oregon football, high-upside USC football, frequently relevant Washington football, and blue-blood UCLA basketball. The SEC added potential national champion Texas plus Texas’s wingman: steady, reliable Oklahoma. One of those lists is twice as long as the other.

So, while the SEC is better at football right now—half the conference is in Movelor’s top 13—the Big Ten closed the gap over this round of realignment, at least in the arena of optics. What does the Big Ten really have going for it, though? This is a little silly, but…its bottom half is worse.

There used to be an argument against Boise State, back in the late 2000’s, which said the Broncos were in better shape come bowl season because they’d borne a lighter regular season load. Thanks to playing weaker conference foes, the Broncos won more often by blowout, allowing their first-stringers to play fewer fourth quarter snaps. Thanks to playing against less heralded recruits, the Broncos took fewer hits from 6’5”, 275-pound edge rushers who run a 4.6-second 40-yard-dash. Their joints had less scar tissue. Their brains had fewer concussion aftereffects.

If an easier schedule is an advantage for this reason, that advantage is probably marginal. The more significant upside to playing a softer schedule is that it’s less likely your team will lose.

As it goes with conference strength, college football résumés are often also evaluated by counting stats: How many ranked teams did you beat? What were your three best wins? Most importantly, how many times did you lose? There are numbers which measure strength of schedule, but the method by which the industry measures schedule strength is variable and somewhat arbitrary. Say one team plays twelve games in which they’re a 75% favorite, while another plays six games in which they’re a 95% favorite and six in which they’re a 55% favorite. The first would be more than 50% more likely to go undefeated. They’d also be significantly likelier to miss a bowl. In one sense, the first is tougher. In another, it’s more difficult. Overall, the schedules would grade out identically through a lot of metrics which name themselves “strength of schedule.”

Maybe because of this strength of schedule muddle, when it comes to playoff selection the counting stats often matter more. Famously, the most important counting stat is that last one we listed above: Losses. Florida State fans will gnash their teeth here, and that’s fair, but theirs was a bizarre circumstance. Nine times out of ten, we did not end up with six separate 12-win power conference teams. Nine times out of ten, the key to making the four-team College Football Playoff was to lose zero games against a schedule that was good enough. The ideal college football schedule for impressing the committee probably features one team in the top ten, two ranked 24th and 25th, the worst FCS team, the three worst FBS teams, and six mediocre power conference foes. Ideally, one of the games against ranked but poorly-ranked competition would be a conference championship, one where this hypothetical playoff hopeful could win comfortably, secure a trophy, and “make a statement” without breaking too much of a sweat.

Last year, Michigan followed this script nearly to a T. They played exactly three ranked opponents. Their nonconference schedule was comically weak. They opened conference play against Rutgers, Nebraska, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan State, and Purdue, six of the Big Ten’s seven worst teams, all teams who would have found themselves in the SEC’s bottom third. Michigan’s conference championship came against a ranked Iowa whom our model graded as worse than 23 of the other 24 ranked squads and many unranked outfits. Michigan even got Ohio State at home. This, for years, was the unintentional beauty of the Big Ten East: It gave its two best teams a great path to the College Football Playoff by offering fairly light competition aside from a showdown between the pair. Whichever beat the other almost always found itself comfortably in the field of four.

This isn’t possible in the SEC. It’s been possible at times, but it’s not right now. Some numbers from our model:

·      Entering Week 2, 37.5% of the SEC’s teams sit outside Movelor’s top 25. The same is true for 61.1% of Big Ten teams.

·      The average SEC team would rank 19th in the country. The average Big Ten team would rank 25th.

·      The average bottom-half SEC team would rank 44th in the country. The average bottom-half Big Ten team would rank 64th.

Who are the teams driving these differences? Here are the 17 worst teams, on paper, of the leagues’ combined 34:

#27 Auburn
#32 Iowa
#42 Wisconsin
#44 Rutgers
#46 Northwestern
#47 UCLA
#48 Illinois
#50 South Carolina
#51 Florida
#53 Arkansas
#58 Purdue
#59 Nebraska
#61 Mississippi State
#73 Minnesota
#82 Michigan State
#84 Indiana
#103 Vanderbilt

Some of these individual rankings will probably change in somewhat predictable ways. Based on what we saw Week 1, Vanderbilt is better than 103rd and Nebraska is better than 59th while South Carolina and UCLA have more to worry about. But the changes aren’t going to be dramatic enough to render the whole list moot. If you combined the SEC and Big Ten and split them down the middle, your top half would have 10 SEC teams and 7 Big Ten teams. Your bottom half would have 6 SEC teams and 11 Big Ten teams.

This isn’t anything nefarious on the Big Ten’s part. This is a phenomenon driven in large part by luck, and whoever wins the Big Ten will be a very good football team. The SEC adjusts for it, too, intentionally or not. While every SEC team plays at least one Big Ten, Big 12, or ACC foe (or Notre Dame), they only play eight conference games to the Big Ten’s nine, diluting the impact of facing the tougher average conference opponent. Many Big Ten teams play power conference competition outside of league play. Others don’t. The result is that the average Big Ten team plays more power conference opponents than the average SEC team. Still, the average SEC team has the tougher schedule. While Michigan was playing Minnesota, Michigan State, and Indiana last year, Alabama had Auburn, Arkansas, and Mississippi State. Those teams are not the same.

It’s unlikely this will decide who wins the national championship. One advantage of the 12-team playoff is that this kind of thing will come out more in the wash. But in the college football reputation game—one which packs playoff brackets and lines university pockets through TV deals—it does pay to have a few weak links.

**

Enjoying College Football Morning? Subscribe to receive it every day in your inbox.

**

Some of our other college football stuff the last two days:

·      We updated our College Football Playoff bracketology.

·      We took a big look at Week 1’s impact on the college football season, starting with the power vacuum it left in the ACC.

·      Good Things Shrewing, our Notre Dame newsletter, talked through where the win in College Station left the Irish before exploring the schedule ahead.

·      We published Movelor’s Week 2 spreads.

**

This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find the rest of Joe Stunardi and NIT Stu’s work.