Ye Olde Green Wave Forum

Here is a summary of the ESPN interview today:

https://ucf.rivals.com/news/danny-white ... appearance

Who did Alabama and Georgia beat? Tennessee? Arkansas? Ole Miss?

After 19 years, I still march to the refrain of "You have to BEAT us to shut us up!"

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Quote:The Good - TULANE
The Bad - LSU
THe Ugly - USM

ALL YE HERE ATTENTION TO ME

The correct solution is...

11 team playoff. Power 5 champs get byes. 2 auto G5 qualifiers, 4 at-large teams

WILD CARD ROUND: Third Saturday in December?
#4 at-large VS #1 G5 at large (G5 home team)
#1 at-large VS #2 G5 at large (#1 at large at home)
#3 at-large VS #2 at-large (#2 at large at home)

CONFERENCE ROUND: Around new years day?
P5 PAC 12 Champ vs BIG 10 Champ (Rose Bowl)
P5 SEC Champ vs Wildcard round winner 2 (Sugar Bowl)
P5 ACC Champ vs Wildcard round winner 2 (Orange Bowl)
P5 BIG 12 Champ vs Wildcard round winner 3 (Fiesta Bowl)

SEMIFINAL ROUND: Second Saturday in January?
Conference round winner's game 1 (Cotton Bowl)
Conference round winner's game 2 (Peach Bowl)

CHAMPIONSHIP:
Last two standing (TBD)

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Pros:
- All P5 Conference champs get byes making the conference championship games more important.
- four at-larges satisfy the top non champs
- two G5 teams with top one guaranteed a home game first round.
- ALL teams in FBS have a shot.

Cons:
-two teams could play a total of 17 games. (15 is the current total. Interestingly 15 is the current total for FCS as well, but that is apples to oranges as FCS only had 63 scholarship players. It seems reasonable that teams with 22 more scholarships could play two more games. I don't see 17 as a big problem especially considering every team that is in the playoff will have played one game against an FCS opponent.)

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Quote:The Good - TULANE
The Bad - LSU
THe Ugly - USM

The "Power 5" are no longer the power 5, so such designations need to be completely eliminated from our consciousness. Other teams have superseded K-State, Tennessee, etc., so that there are now better teams in the also-ran conferences. In a few years, the pecking order will have continued to shift. Hell, I don't think we can state with certainty that Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, etc. will be top teams 10 years from now, unless we continue to buy into the hype that surrounds their programs.

And, in reality, there is absolutely no good reason why conference championships have to mean anything at all beyond the conference.

Only one team can be crowned the champion. After that, the standings are meaningless. The fairest way is to determine the 16 teams who have the best claim to the crown (after the first 10 or so, the claim becomes a bit specious, so coming in 17th or 18th is not being "left out of a shot."

Seed 16 teams and it's winner take all. Top 8 play at home the first week, and then 7 of the existing bowl games over 3 weeks determine the champion. If a 4-week playoff is "too many games," simply trim back the regular season.

It's so easy, a caveman could do it.

http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/celebrate-tulane-footballs-1998-national-championship-in-style/504956456

Post without comment other than a hope for fatso sizes.

There is precedent for us claiming a national title. Research the national titles Alabama claims from the past 120 years or so. Some of the "polls" from the early 1900s are really sketchy at best.

Wrong.

Its the only way that ensures that every team has a path on the field to the playoff, not reliant on a poll or a computer ranking.

I'd like to see all conference champions go to the playoff. That will never happen. Next best thing:

8 team playoff. 5 P5 champions. Highest rated G5 champion. Two at large teams.

This year, based on the bowl committee rankings and the AP rankings and the coaches poll (all agreeing), it would have been:
Georgia
USC
Oklahoma
Ohio State
Clemson
UCF
Alabama
Wisconsin

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“We will expect success in all endeavors and be prepared to assess and hold ourselves accountable when we aren't successful. Tulane is a top 40 academic institution and it should expect nothing less from its athletic department.” --Troy Dannen 11.5.16

A better thing is to dispense with Conferences altogether. If teams want to join a conference to facilitate scheduling and such, fine, but every team should compete on the field as an independent, and the top 16 then seeded (with appropriate tie-breakers, if necessary).

Sorry Roller. but these conferences were originally created because of relating to each other regionally. I like the league play myself.

Thanks Roller. there's that 1929 team again. That's one Tulane should definitely declare NC's.

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Football is here ! Ugh

At first, I thought that's a nice marketing ploy. Then the more I thought about it, the more I realized it makes a ton of sense from a historical college football perspective. If there are seasons with 5 title claims, then any undefeated season should definitely warrant us claiming a title.

Tulane, 2X National Champs. I like the sound of that.

That's true, Ray, but in today's world, the conferences have become a tool for exclusion. They are not completely as "regional" as they were in the beginning. And they add teams from other regions while ignoring teams that more appropriately fit within their region. By restricting their membership, the conferences have become a ploy to garner more of the money and attention.

It's not the idea of conferences that I find objectionable; it's the way they are used. Tying conference affiliation to qualifying to compete in the championship tournament merely guarantees that a deserving team will get passed over for some conference champion who is not as good. The tournament must be seeded with the 16 "best"* teams, regardless of conference affiliation or conference standing.

* Determining who the 16 "best" teams are is a separate exercise, and there are many opinions about how the ranking should be performed. However, my personal opinion is that the process should be 100% objective, scrupulously avoiding all subjective measures. To me, the loss-based algorithm I proposed several years ago still makes the most sense and is the most fair. It penalizes each loss based upon the strength of the team you lost to, and the strength of the teams that those teams lost to, and so on, out to the 12th (or 13th) degree of separation, which represents a true "strength of schedule" without falling back on subjective measures. It has the added advantage that all undefeated teams are deemed to be tied for 1st, so other factors (margins of victory, for example) can be used to break ties.

Roller, Do you know how your proposed system would have played out this year? Thanks.

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"You're not here on scholarship to lose. I didn't recruit you to lose. Losing is abnormal; losing is unusual; losing is unacceptable. That's not what we're here for."
Bob Knight

Any attempt to pick the "best" teams is inherently subjective. Its only a variance of HOW subjective. It doesn't matter if its the 8 "best" teams, so long as they are all deserving, and everyone had an on-field path to control their own destiny

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“We will expect success in all endeavors and be prepared to assess and hold ourselves accountable when we aren't successful. Tulane is a top 40 academic institution and it should expect nothing less from its athletic department.” --Troy Dannen 11.5.16

No, it's a lot of work to search for every score of every game and then enter them into my spreadsheet (because, for best results, EVERY game has to be put into the system, even Div II games). However, the few years I did keep up with it, the final standings were very close to the subjective standings you see in the media. The main difference was that the lesser-heralded teams fared better in my system, which removed the "usual suspects" approach of the polls.

Not true. If all you're using is W-L data, there is no subjective input. The numbers are what they are. All that matters is winning (or more precisely, not-losing), and how your opponents did at not losing (and their opponents, and their opponents' opponents, their opponents' opponents' opponents, etc.). A perfect season nets a ranking-score of zero, and the teams are ranked based upon the lowest ranking-score. Losing a game will net you ranking-score points that are based upon the ranking-score of the team that beat you (which, in turn, is based upon that teams' opponents' and opponents' opponents ranking-scores, etc.) The "strength of schedule" is automatically factored in by the impact of the ranking-scores of nearly 116 trillion potential connections*, so there is good differentiation; therefore, ties are not very likely, except for undefeated teams (who will all have a ranking-score of 0).

It comes down to
a) setting appropriate scaling factors for the results that are further removed from the actual game you played in (if the factors are out of range, the calculations may not converge),
b) entering ALL of the results every week,
c) ignoring such factors as injuries, home field, or day-of-the-week effects,
d) and not letting your eyes glaze over when listening to the explanation.


* (if all teams play 13 games), but the number of connections is actually very much smaller (perhaps 10 billion or so), since only losses get factored in.

The creator and implementation of a formula = subjective. The data may not be, but choosing which formul to implement is

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“We will expect success in all endeavors and be prepared to assess and hold ourselves accountable when we aren't successful. Tulane is a top 40 academic institution and it should expect nothing less from its athletic department.” --Troy Dannen 11.5.16

The formula is what it is. There is no way to tweak it to favor any team or group of teams. The weights assigned to to each successive iteration do affect the outcome, but the only "subjectivity" (and it really isn't subjective) involved is how much more to weight a loss that is a few degrees of separation compared to a loss that it further down the chain.

For instance, if you lose to team A, who lost to team B, who lost to team C, who lost to team D, who lost to team E, who lost to team F, how much more weight should you give to the team B loss when compared to the team F loss? Those factors are constant numbers, applied evenly regardless of which team is involved. Of course, the losses further down the chain are weighted much less. In practice, I tried to choose factors that would allow the results to converge at the 6th decimal position. Making the factors too high makes the calculation never converge, even when allowed to run out to the 12th decimal. Making the numbers too low makes the algorithms converge more quickly, but results in too rapid a convergence, leading to ties at the 2nd or 3rd decimal. I picked numbers that gave a quick enough convergence, but still resulted in a large er separation between teams' standings. It's an objective approach, devoid of any subjectivity.

It took me about 4-5 hours each week to gather and post results, which a team (being paid) could manage, but it was a bit much for me to do simply to prove my point. If there were less than 2 undefeated teams, it would be easier, but 2 or more undefeated teams would ideally lead to some sort of tiebreaker, so other data could be used (margin of error, total points, average final ranking of opponents, or anything else that is determined before the season begins).

Yes, but choosing that formula is itself subjective

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“We will expect success in all endeavors and be prepared to assess and hold ourselves accountable when we aren't successful. Tulane is a top 40 academic institution and it should expect nothing less from its athletic department.” --Troy Dannen 11.5.16

UCF ends the year 6th in the AP, behind all playoff participants and Ohio St. If that's not a joke, I don't know what is.

They want you to think things are more fair than they were 19 years ago when this all started.... Apparently beating the only team that actually beat the national champion (and also beat the title game opponent) gets you a whopping ONE spot higher than Tulane in 1998 when we were stuck whipping BYU in our bowl.