Year in Review

Well faithful followers, the year is officially over for me. After this blog I will be taking some time off from now until sometime in March. Then in March I will be back with a Mock Draft Blog. Then from there I will probably be down to 1 blog a month on topics such as the new play-off system, recruiting, who is looking good, etc, and anything else exciting that may come up in the off-season. As for next year, the ground work is already being laid for some huge changes and some fantastic insight. I cannot wait for the new season to begin already. But before I say adios for a month or so lets put a big ole red bow on this past year.

1. Bowl Game Recaps
In my last blog I posted the records for each conference in this year's bowls. Here is a little closer look at that:

SEC - went 7-3 this year with wins over the ACC(2), B10(2), AAC, C-USA, and the B12, the losses were to the B12, ACC, and B10. Of the losses I can truly say I never saw the Oklahoma win over the Tide. Yes Georgia was a ranked team that was rattled with injuries and the Huskers are a lot more talented that how they play, not a huge upset. As for mis-matches in this year's bowls, I think they were all evenly matched except for Georgia Tech/Ole Miss which was heavy SEC favor and maybe LSU/Iowa which had a close socre, but wasn't that close of a game, in the SEC favor.

Pac12 - went 6-3 this year with wins over the Mountain West (2), ACC (2), Independents, and B12. The losses came to the Mountain West, B12, and B10. Of the losses, Colorado State had a huge comeback against Washington State, which was one of the better MW teams against a middle of the road Pac12; then Arizona State laid an egg against the Red Raiders and the Spartans out muscled Stanford. The Pac12 has had a hard time against the MW in previous years but went 2-1 this year. As for mis-matches the Pac12 benefited in their 2 matchups against the ACC: UCLA/Va Tech, and Arizona/BC. All in all though I would say that the Pac12 finally started making some strides that I said they needed to make early in the year. They were the 2nd toughest conference in the regular season this year and then backed that up with a great bowl record, even if some of it was against soft competition. The old Pac12 would have folded.

B12 - went 3-3 this year and pulled out wins against the SEC, Pac12, and B10 and lost to the SEC, AAC, and Pac12. The bowl record is very indicative of the type of year the B12 had. They had some flash, they beat some teams, but they also lost to some teams. The split with the Pac12 and SEC shows how up and down this conference is. The Sooners pulled one out against Bama, then the Cowboys went down to Missouri. The Longhorns suffered from a poorly matched game and lost to the Ducks, but then the Red Raiders pulled out an upset against the Sun Devils. You never knew week to week how the B12 was going to show up. They pulled out the upsets in this year's bowl season and then Baylor went down to UCF.

ACC - went 5-6 this year but probably suffered from sending too many mediocre teams into bowl games this year. They scored wins against the B10 (2), the AAC, and the MAC...the losses came to the SEC (2), the Pac12 (2), C-USA, and the AAC. The wins against the B10 were not surprising, Clemson beat Ohio State, and the other was Syracuse over Minnesota. Then a UNC team that sleep walked the whole year came alive against a good Cincy team, but a suspect Miami was blown out by Louisville. The win against the MAC isn't really impressive and they went 0-4 against the best two conferences, granted the games against the Pac12 were over-matched contests, and the losses against the SEC included a winnable game by Duke against the Aggies, and a severely over matched Yellow Jacket team against Ole Miss.

B10 - went 2-5 this year and it just does not get any better for this conference. The Spartans beat Stanford and proved themselves, the Huskers lived up to their potential and beat a hurting Georgia, but after that....they lost 2 to the SEC (South Carolina in an evenly matched game, and LSU in a SEC favored game), lost 2 to the ACC with Clemson beating a closely matched Ohio State, and middle of the road Syracuse beating a middle of the road Minnesota. Oh yeah, they also lost to the B12 when a very middle of the road K-State beat Michigan.

2. Final Performance Index
So now with all the games in the books I can roll out my final Performance Index of the year. Before I get into the rankings I want to point out that there was one "fatal flaw" in my rankings. And I would like to thank Stanford for exploiting that flaw this year. All year I had Stanford in my top 4 and then they went out and got beat by a Michigan St team that I had way too low. When I put in the W and the L for these two teams I noticed something strange...Stanford lost the game and their Index score went UP. That is not right. So I started to experiment and sure enough teams were benefiting just from playing a ranked team regardless of whether they won or not. Well that cannot be. A team must win for the index to have any meaning. Also, Stanford had 3 losses on the season and a team with 3 losses cannot be anywhere close to my top 4 teams, I don't care how good your conference is. Stanford also had a loss to an un-ranked opponent, another "no-no" in my book if you are going to be considered elite. Great teams beat the teams they should. Period. So with all of that being said I went to work to rectify the "Stanford Problem" in my index. The first thing I did was introduce Negative points into the scoring system. I had originally set up the index not to "punish" teams, well if you lose to un-ranked teams, and lose 3 or more games in a year, you don't need to be punished necessarily but you need to be taken down some notches. So here are the changes I made:
Strength of Schedule
     Teams who play a hard schedule and survive week after week should be rewarded. They have been through the fire and proved themselves, BUT my limit is 2...as in 2 losses. If you lose 2 teams in ranked competition you get a -1 and it gets worse from there. If you only lose 1 you get 0 and if you lose none, you get a point.
Eye Test
     Overall loses is another issue and my limit is 3, if you lose 3 games you get -1 and it goes down from there. If you lose 2 games in a year that is 0 points, because 1 loss and 0 loss teams should be held in higher regard regardless of schedule or conference (ie Michigan State). I also added another part to the Eye Test and that is "Losses to Unranked Teams." This is a absolute "no-no" for anyone wanting to get into the big show, in my opinion. So if you go undefeated, that's great, you get a point, but if you lose to ONE unranked opponent it drops to -.5 and gets worse from there.
Conference Performance
     I feel like I have seen a light on this one. While this is a very important part of a team's make-up, how much control do they really have with this? And as has been proven, GOOD TEAMS PLAY IN BAD CONFERENCES, ie: Michigan State, and FSU. So I tweaked the conferences a little and gave different point values depending on how tough your conference is and how losses you have and then I lowered the weight that this part of the index carries. It is now the 3rd most important factor and is weighted at a 1.25; the Eye Test is at 1.5 and the Schedule is at 1.75. This made a huge difference in the rankings and I think make a lot more sense. So now without further delay here is my final Performance Index for this past season:

1	FSU	17.81
2	Auburn	17.69
3	Michigan State	15.63
4	Missouri	15.25
5	Alabama	14.25
6	South Carolina	12.63
7	Stanford	12.31
8	Baylor	12.25
9	UCF	12.06
	Oklahoma	12.06
11	Oregon	10.69
12	LSU	10.38
13	Clemson	9.44
14	UCLA	9.38
15	Ohio State	8.19
16	Arizona State	8.13
17	Oklahoma State	7.38
18	Louisville	5.81

All is right with the world, FSU is at #1 (they weren't till I made the changes), Michigan State is in the Top 4 and Stanford has dropped to 7th. I think this is fair, they were a conference champ, they play in the second hardest conference, but damn they lost too many games. So in a play-off year we would get FSU/Missouri and Auburn/Michigan State. Not a bad way to set it up at all. BUT, if you look at an 8 game play-off which I think is the best scenario, THOSE are some great matchups:

Baylor/FSU, Stanford/Auburn, South Carolina/Michigan State, Alabama/Missouri - who wins a national championship out of that? Sadly, UCF could not quite make the cut. Their conference is way to bad and when the conference is THAT terrible you have to go un-defeated. If they had gone un-defeated they would have been in the Top 5.

3. The Best and Worst I saw (only speaking of teams I actually watched during the season)
Best offense - Baylor
Worst offense - Florida
Best defense- FSU
Worst defense - Texas A&M
Best quarterback - Terry Bridgewater
Best running back - Tre Mason
Best WR - Jarvis Landry
Best TE - Jace Amaro
Most undisciplined team - Georgia Tech
Team that rose and fell the quickest on my board - Baylor
Most inconsistent - Stanford
Most consistent - FSU
Team that played in my "Game of the Week" the most - first of all I watched 20 different teams play in my Game of the Week during the year. Baylor, Clemson, Washington, Bama, Auburn, Georgia, South Carolina all got 2 viewings (not counting conference championships/bowl games), but the team that played in the most "big" games during the regular season for me was LSU with 4 different games that got the Game of the Week treatment. But I don't think they played in any after the mid-point of the season.

Thanks for taking the time to read this year. I will be back in a month or so with a huge draft break-down!