Two Years ago, I made the case that Virginia Tech and Cincinnati potentially could have been considered for the National Title game because they came out of a very competitive ACC and Big East, two conferences that fared extremely well against their BCS opponents. Putting together those stats got me wondering, so since I’m pretty much the stats guy on this site, let’s take a look at the expanded out-of-conference records for all 11 D-1A conferences in the 2010 season. Well here it is. Click on the table below to view it full size. I don’t know how else to embed a big table in blogger.
So let’s take a look at the table and see if we can make any observations.
– First the ground rules. This table shows each conference’s record vs. every other conference, plus the conferences record against all of D-1AA (screw this FBS/FCS naming thing). The “Indies” are Army, Navy, and Notre Dame, who make up a fictional 3 team conference. Post conferences, the grand totals show each conference’s non-conference record, record vs. D-1A only, and record vs BCS conference teams only (The 6 AQ conferences and Notre Dame). Boxes that are grayed out means the 2 conferences did not play all season.
– The two undefeated conference champions playing in the BCS championship game come from the best (PAC-10 at 10-5) and 3rd best (SEC at 10-6) conferences against BCS opponents from outside the conference. Maybe the BCS got it right after all. Only 1 PAC-10/SEC game was played all year, and it was won by the PAC-10 when Oregon stomped Tennessee.
– In contrast, TCU’s Mountain West was 7th out of 12 against the BCS, only going 5-10, finishing behind the Indies and WAC (the MWC also was only 4-8 against the WAC this year, but they are getting the top 4 WAC teams in the next 2 years. If you can’t beat them, join them), but the MWC did better against the BCS than BCS conferences ACC and Big East
– The Big East was only 3-12 against BCS teams. Awful
– Despite going 10-5 against the BCS, the PAC-10 only finished 14-10 vs. D-1A, so that means they were only 4-5 against C-USA, MAC, WAC, and MWC (they didn’t play the Sun Belt)
– Thanks largely to 19 total games vs. the Sun Belt and D-1AA, the SEC finished the season with the best record vs. D-1A and total non-conference. They victimized the Sun Belt a perfect 8 times and went 10-1 against D-1AA.
– The only conference to beat up on D-1AA more than the SEC was the ACC, who went 12-1 against them. That helped get them an impressive 30-18 non-conference record, but they were only 18-17 against D-1A and 6-13 against the BCS.
– The MAC mostly exists to get big paydays for playing at Big Ten teams early in the season, so not surprisingly this was the most common conference vs. conference matchup in 2010, with the Big Ten winning 11 of 13 games. The above mentioned MWC vs. WAC was 2nd with 12 games.
– D-1AA teams managed to beat D-1A teams 7 times this season in 90 games played. Not bad for them. The only conference to lose more than once to a D-1AA team was the MAC. D-1AA managed to get 1 win over 4 of the 6 BCS conferences.
– I think everyone will admit that the WAC and MWC are downright competitive, and college football (at least until things get shaken up) really have 8 “power” conferences, with the Big East probably being the worst of those 8. However 3 conferences actually were worse than the Big East this year…..
– C-USA was a somewhat respectable 14-28 against the rest of D-1A this year, and were 5-22 against the BCS, which is pretty much expected for a lower level conference. They have to be pretty proud of Tulsa’s win over Notre Dame, though.
– The MAC was a downright awful 7-35 against D-1A and 3-25 against the BCS. (Toledo over Purdue, Northern Illinois over Minnesota, Temple over Big East Champion UCONN)
– The Sun Belt being in D-1A is pretty much a joke. They went 0-26 this year against the BCS (including 8 losses to the SEC, who would miss them if they moved down) and were only 2-32 vs. all of D-1A (Troy over Bowling Green and FAU over UAB). Surprisingly, they only decided to play D-1AA twice, and won both of those games.
– I think that sums it up. Check out the table and feel free to put your conclusions in the comments.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
