Testing Spurrier's East Carolina Quote

Earlier this month, Steve Spurrier was quoted as saying, “Playing East Carolina is maybe a little bit better than playing one of those bottom-tier Big Ten teams.”  So I thought that I would use this quote as way to get the Honors Primetime group to see if this quote was true and if it could be extended to other FBS conferences.

To do this, we looked at how to rank NCAA FBS teams using the Complex Invasion College Football Production Function Model.  In class we went through all the gory details of how to calculate and judge the significance of the model - which I will skip in this blog post.

After estimating the offense and defensive production of each team from 2008 to 2013 and calculating the rank of total team productivity, we calculated the average end of season rank for all the teams in college football.  For simplicity, we just used the team's conference membership in 2013.

What the Honors Primetime students found is that Spurrier is correct, but not complete.  By that Spurrier's statement is true for all of the ten conferences in college football over the last six seasons plus the independent schools.

First we calculated the average rank of the East Carolina Pirates, which was 60.33 - or about the middle of the league.  Then we calculated the average rank for all the teams and found that each conference has at least one team with an average rank below the East Carolina Pirates during this time period.

Below is the average rank of the teams in each conference.  We have left the team names off of the table.  The numbers in red are the average rank of the teams that are below East Carolina.  (Note that the higher number ranking means less productive team).

ACC	Big 12	AAC	Big 10	CUSA	IND	MidAmerican	MountainWest	PAC 12	SEC	SunBelt
22.50	15.67	27.33	16.33	48.33	33.67	23.67	9.83	8.50	4.50	55.00
33.17	19.50	36.33	20.33	60.33	43.50	55.17	43.00	32.00	23.83	63.00
34.00	20.17	41.67	33.50	62.17	48.17	62.00	54.00	34.00	31.67	69.50
36.83	38.67	49.17	35.67	66.17	90.00	66.00	60.00	43.17	32.33	82.50
40.50	40.50	52.83	37.50	68.17	105.17	69.83	60.67	48.00	33.17	83.50
47.00	46.67	59.67	42.00	72.17	114.17	70.17	69.00	48.67	35.67	86.33
47.83	49.83	61.00	56.00	75.00		71.50	77.67	57.50	42.67	92.00
64.00	56.83	62.67	59.83	80.83		71.83	78.50	65.83	55.17	118.00
65.67	94.83	66.33	72.50	86.17		75.17	89.00	69.83	56.00
71.83	95.17	93.17	82.50	86.17		97.50	91.83	71.17	56.83
74.50			84.33	91.33		99.17	103.00	102.33	57.50
76.67			94.17	99.67		104.33	103.33	104.00	59.00
88.83				100.00		123.00			65.00
89.17				103.00					84.83

SI on Changes in CFB Rankings

Short video about changes in the college football rankings for the selection committee.

Strength of Schedule and CFB Playoffs

Here is a different strength of schedule argument for the upcoming NCAA football playoffs - that wins will dominate the discussion and thus SOS will not come into play in the final analysis of who is in and who is out.

My argument is somewhat different.  When looking at winning percent for a given season, after taking into account points scored and points surrendered, strength of schedule is statistically insignificant (i.e. it doesn't matter).