The rest of my predictions and how shitty they probably were…

OK I will try and not do a huge post like I did with the conference standings (although it could have been even larger).  No fancy calculations.  Just my successes and my failures and I expect more of the latter than the former.  So here we go, in no particular order, my predictions this past season:

My Heisman Ballot

Ok so Braxton Miller got injured.  I should get a pass there.  And not many people had Jameis Winston on their radar because he was a freshman.  Another pass.  So let’s see how my top five compared to the real top five:

My top five: Braxton Miller, Gianni Futbol, Teddy Ballgame, Jadeveon Clowney, Marqise Lee

Actual top five: Jameis Winston, AJ McCarron, Jordan Lynch, Andre Williams, Gianni Futbol

Yeah I am never getting a ballot even if I was qualified to.  I had McCarron 7th and Lynch has honourable mention (so just outside the top 10).  And to anyone who had Andre Williams on their pre-season ballot: can you pick my lottery numbers because you clearly know something others do not.

My National Championship picks

Georgia vs. Ohio State.

Well I came within one not-so-good game on getting the Buckeyes correct.  Georgia had so many injuries but looking back it’s no excuse.  I shouldn’t have picked them to even win the SEC East let alone the conference and possibly the whole damn thing.  Clemson into the BCS was a good pick, while giving Louisville and especially Texas that much faith was a bad call on my part.

Various Team Predictions

This could be a very long section but let’s start with the good news (as in the teams I got pretty close to correct):

Ohio State – I figured they would waltz through their regular season schedule and they did.  Not my fault they laid an egg at the most inopportune time.

Stanford – Not quite the correct record (I had them 11-1 and they finished 10-2) but I had them beating Oregon for the Pac-12 North title, something most pundits didn’t see happening.

Utah State – I don’t think there was anyone who figured the Aggies could beat out Boise State for the Mountain West Mountain division title.  I gave myself a pat on the back for that one, especially after Chuckie Keeton went down to injury.

Fresno State – Speaking of the Mountain West, I had Fresno State running the table.  They easily won their division but even I couldn’t have forseen them losing to San Jose State.

Marshall – Not a tough pick since it was either them or East Carolina for the C-USA East crown.

The entire Pac-12 South – Switch my picks of USC for 1st and ASU for 2nd and I would have had it totally correct.

And now the bad, and some of them were terrible:

Louisiana Tech and Tulsa – I had these two teams 1-2 in the C-USA West.  I was one of very few to pick the Bulldogs that high and I paid for it.  Then again, hardly anyone had good predictions for that division.  And no, I’m sure no one had UTSA winning that many games.

Duke – I know, no one had them winning their division but I had them tied for last with lowly Virginia.  Big mistake.

Baylor – Like Duke, I figured Baylor would move back.  Not as far as the Blue Devils as I had the Bears in the middle of the Big XII.

Northwestern – I was out at a bar and, amazingly, one of the TVs had the mid-season Northwestern-Ohio State game on.  It was a pretty good game to watch.  After that, everything Northwestern football did was unwatchable.

Missouri and Auburn – I am packaging these two together.  I had Missouri 5th and Auburn last respectively in their divisions.  I don’t think there was anyone out there who picked either team to be in the SEC Championship but I think I shit the bed on this one by putting both teams lower than they deserved in the first place.

Iowa – This could be the worst of my predictions.  I had them pegged as the worst BCS-conference team.  Boy was I wrong.  All Iowa did was be over  .500 and go to a New Year’s Day bowl game.  I feel I need to apologize to Kirk Ferentz and the entire football team there.  Luckily for me I live quite a ways away from Iowa City so there’s almost no chance of running into any of them and/or them reading my blog (which they most certainly do not).

NCAA football on Canadian TV

Not so much a prediction but an outlook on what we could expect of NCAA football appearing on Canadian television (and more specifically, in southern Ontario).  Well, TSN exceeded my expectations later on in the season.  Early on it didn’t look so good but late they were showing two and three games a week which was a pleasant sight.  Sportsnet completely bombed on their college football coverage and it looks like they may be completely out of the game now that they have their massive NHL TV rights package that will focus on Saturday games.  Unfortunately, I think, overall, that there will be less games on readily available cable channels (TSN, Sportsnet, Peachtree, etc.).  The new SEC network (which is run by ESPN) should throw an interesting wrinkle into some of the broadcasts this season.  It looks like having the Super Sports Pack (Rogers) or the U.S. College Sports Package (Bell) will be even more important this coming season.  I will have it again, despite the fact I’m sure the cost will go above $100 for the year.  It includes college basketball but until conference tournament time I don’t watch much of that.  The hope is that the packages will include ESPNews games and/or more ESPN3 games.  I wish they would put some Fox Sports 1 games but I can’t see that happening, at least for next season.

I don’t know how many posts I will have over the rest of the winter since there probably won’t be much to talk about.  At some point I will do some sort of mock NFL draft article and start to look towards the next college football season.

And just an FYI for everyone, take a look back at my NFL picks for this season.  Don’t look at the details, just the two teams I have picked for the Super Bowl.  I believe they are the same two teams that are actually playing in the Super Bowl.  Aw yeah!  And yes, I realize the rest of my NFL picks mostly amount to shit but I got the main two correct!

How well I predicted the college football season – conference standings

Update: I have updated this to include the true calculations since I was wildly off the first time.  And I call myself a former math teacher…updates are in italics.

I am an avid reader of the Phil Steele College Football magazine every year.  In my honest opinion, no one does a more thorough look into the upcoming college football season than Phil Steele.  The guy eats, drinks, breathes, sleeps, and shits college football.

In his magazine he refers to being the best magazine for predictions over the past two decades.  The way this is tabulated is through a site called stassen.com.  It is a treasure trove of information on college football and one of the charts he does is how the various preseason magazines do on predicting conference standings and puts the results up against each other.  Overall, Phil Steele has the best predictions over the past two decades and has won the season title a few times as well.  This year is no exception.  Phil Steele barely beat the website Cap Heresy for the preseason prediction title.

I figured I would see how well I did based on the calculations from that site as well.  My guess is I would finish dead last but I wanted to know for sure how shitty my prognostications were.  How this works is as follows:

• Take my conference standings and rank the teams from first to worst.  In the case of a tie, an average of the rankings would be given to both teams.  For example, if team A and team B were predicted to be tied for 3rd, then they would get the average of the 3rd and 4th rankings, 3.5.
• Then look at the actual conference standings from this season.  However, if there are two teams tied for, say, 2nd place, they will receive the numbers 2 and 3.  The number closest to the prediction will be used in calculations.
• Find the difference for every team.
• Add up the numbers and that’s the total score.

For your information to start, Phil Steele won with a 119, beating Cap Heresy’s 120.  The worst score was 155 by College Football Matrix.  The average was in the 130s somewhere (I didn’t feel like finding that number).  As for my score, I did the calculations and came out with a….

166.  Actually, it was a 142.

Holy shit not terrible but not that great.  142?  I probably could have picked at random and got a better score than that.  Where did I go wrong?  Here are a few reasons:

• Picking Auburn dead last in the SEC West killed me.  The difference was 5 points (they finished in a tie for first in the SEC West) and I had a 9 for the division, worse than any other magazine.  Originally I had calculated 11 but the right calculation is 9, still pretty shitty.
• Did pretty good with the Big Ten Leaders with a 5…until I found out that tied me for last.  Same with the Big Ten Legends and my 13 (also tied for last; actually one point from last after re-calculation).
• Big 12…14 (actually 12…but not good).  Picking Baylor tied for 6th hurt.  I see a pattern here.
• It seems most of the conferences I didn’t do well, but nothing worse than the Conference USA West.  I scored a 19.  Basically that says I could have put the teams in a hat and had a 90% chance of picking a better set of rankings.

Ok I am done with this.  In summary, I sucked.  Hopefully I do a bit better this coming year (or I calculated it wrong and I actually didn’t do too badly).  I will look at some other predictions I made in a future post and then start looking at the next season…months ahead of time.

Update: After re-calculating, I don’t feel so bad.  So I will go ahead with conference predictions next season and hope to improve my standing (although I am still sure I will never beat Phil Steele).

BCS Championship and other thoughts as the college football season ends

What an absolutely amazing end to the college football season.  It’s funny that in the last year of the “horrid” BCS, we see the best set of BCS bowl games ever, by a long shot.  Every single one of them was exciting.  This is what the BCS was supposed to be.  It just took 16 long, agonizing years to get there.

And I was so close to getting the right score (I had FSU 34-30 over Auburn).  So I gave myself a pat on the back since I became a beacon of mediocrity with my bowl pools this year.  Went 23-12 which isn’t bad but those damn confidence pools bug me in that regard.  You don’t have to get the most right to win those things.  And it’s not like you’re picking against the spread.  Anyway, enough of that quasi-gambling-based rant.

Coaching Carousel

Announced just an hour or so ago, James Franklin will be heading to Happy Valley to be the head coach at Penn State.  What an unreal hire.  Arguably the best coaching hire in a while.  Don’t get me wrong, Charlie Strong to Texas and Fun Bobby Petrino to Louisville are good hires, but nothing compares to this one.  Now the carousel comes around to Vanderbilt which is all of a sudden a fairly highly prominent job to have.  Don’t be surprised to see a great assistant or a good non-BCS school head coach get the nod here.  I still think Pete Lembo out of Ball State is due for a move up but don’t sleep on Doc Halliday out of Marshall or Clemson’s OC Chad Morris.

Re-alignment

There’s very little of it.  Here’s a rundown (so far) as to the differences you’ll see next season:

• Rutgers and Maryland move to the Big Ten East Division (yes the Big Ten has decided to stop with the absolutely fucking ridiculous Leaders and Legends divisions)
• Louisville moves to the ACC and instantly becomes a contender there
• East Carolina, Tulsa, and Tulane move to the American conference. Navy will follow one year later and God only knows what kind of divisions they’ll come up with there.
• Western Kentucky and Old Dominion move to Conference USA.  The Monarchs will be ineligible for a bowl game this season but this program looks a lot like UTSA…meaning a team that, once eligible, will be above .500 probably almost every season.  Charlotte moves here in 2015.
• New Mexico State and Idaho go back to the Sun Belt.  And yes, they will still be pretty horrible.  There’s a good chance they will be worse than the other Sun Belt newcomers, Georgia Southern (fresh off their victory over Florida) and Appalachian State (yes, THAT Appalachian State).

As for what will happen beyond 2015, who knows.  I know that at some point, one of the Big Five will go to 16 teams.  Whether that’s good or bad is anyone’s guess.

Schedules

The one good thing about college football is that usually games are scheduled years in advance.  Even the Pac-12 has already come out with their conference schedule for next season (and I’m pretty sure another conference or two have as well).  Some point during the off-season I will look at the most important games to look forward to in 2014.

TV

This will be an interesting year when it comes to FBS broadcasts in Canada.  We will always get CBS, ABC, Notre Dame on NBC, and FOX games.  However, Sportsnet now has the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE NHL deal so they will be showing hockey games most Saturdays.  It’s not that Sportsnet really showed all that much college football but we can be rest assured that that number will fall to almost zero this coming season.  So hopefully TSN picks up the ball a bit.  It will be interesting to note if we see the TSN of the latter part of the season when there were multiple games on every weekend or the TSN of the early part of the season where the amount of games showed per week, on average, would have to be a number between 0 and 1.  This is where I am glad I have the U.S. College Sports Package from Bell.  Yeah, it’s pricey and I can see the price going up but it has all the ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPNU games that aren’t shown elsewhere.  My hope is that this (and the Super Sports Pack from Rogers) starts to include some ESPNews and ESPN3 games or some Fox Sports 1 games.  I am sure the Fox games won’t be shown but to have more ESPN games could happen.  We will have to wait and see on that one.

Predictions

Starting next week I will post on my predictions from this season as well as my NFL predictions (my Denver-Seattle Super Bowl prediction still has a chance!).  I plan on using the same method as they use on www.stassen.com to compare preseason magazines and their predictions to one another.  It will be interesting to see how good my predictions were (spoiler alert: they probably weren’t).

Thoughts on bowls up until the BCS Championship

Alright, I will admit I was fully planning on doing a few posts up until the BCS Championship game tonight. Unfortunately, I got sick and my PVR exploded with the amount of football on it.  There was no way to watch it all (again, unfortunate) so I skimmed through some games.  Problem was there were a lot of fantastic football games that I was only able to watch a half or a quarter of.  Stupid flu bug.  Anyway, a totally random listing of thoughts on this bowl season:

• First and most important point: I went 22-12 up until this point in the bowl pool.  Good stuff.  Problem was it was a confidence pool so the games I was most confident about ended up going the wrong way for me (thanks a lot Rice).
• To pick the best bowl game this season is tough.  In terms of excitement, I would say the New Mexico Bowl, Chick-fil-A Bowl, or Orange Bowl.  In terms of importance, it would be the Alamo Bowl or Rose Bowl.
• And you wonder why some people have a bad feeling about football players: Roderic Blunt of Middle Tennessee gets the bowl season’s Capital One Bowl Week (it’s more like two and a half) Douchebaggery Award.  What an absolute asshole to be doing the shit he was doing during the Armed Forces Bowl (trying to eye gouge was possibly the worst).  But that Rick Stockstill did nothing about it is probably worse.  There’s your reason why this guy isn’t being hired by a more prominent school.  And thanks Blunt you dickhead for proving the adage that 5% are ruining it for the other 95% (although in this case it’s more 0.1% ruining it for the other 99.9%).
• Draft status: Some players definitely improved their draft status (see Bortles, Blake).  But I’m still mystified as to the love given to Austin Sefarian-Jenkins.  I think it’s the fact he looks a lot like Gronk or Graham but I don’t see him as this ultra-talented tight end and I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find at least 5 other college tight ends who are more talented than him.
• If it wasn’t for Michigan State, the Big Ten would have looked horrible this bowl season.  Then again, this year you could probably easily classify them as the fifth-best conference out of the 5 power conferences.  And Rutgers and Maryland joining doesn’t exactly evoke an emotion of fear in the other four conferences.
• The coaching carousel (cue circus music): Now that Charlie Strong has landed at Texas, who takes over for the ACC’s newest team in Louisville?  It seems like everyone wants Fun Bobby Petrino to return to the school where he had his greatest successes but I’m not so sure.  I’m still puzzled as to why Pete Lembo of Ball State isn’t getting any attention here.  And no, David Cutcliffe won’t be leaving Duke to go to another ACC school so that rumour can be squashed right now.
• Crowds: There were a lot of good crowds this bowl season.  Yes for every near-packed house (New Orleans Bowl) there were sparse crowds (Idaho Potato Bowl).  I still believe that the amount of bowl tie-ins should be capped at five or six with the remaining bowls getting to pick from the leftover pool of teams.  It would allow bowls greater flexibility and possibly create better matchups which would turn into better crowds which turns into more money.  So I’m shocked the NCAA isn’t on this bandwagon yet.

Tonight’s Game

I am not quite 100% yet but I would say a solid 80% in terms of health.  So I plan on watching every minute of this game.  I still think Florida State will win but it will be close….at least for three quarters.  There’s a reason the Noles beat their opponents by an average of over 40 points this season.  They are that damn good.

OK so this is a promise that I will keep barring any unforseen circumstances.  I will be posting again later this week on thoughts of the BCS Championship and the season as a whole.  A few posts to follow on how my predictions were and some predictions on what we could see next season.