I was pretty happy when I started my day on Sunday September 24. I was in the middle of my vacation in Mexico and familiarizing myself with the new hotel (the vacation wasn’t all in the same hotel). While relaxing in the bar area, I noticed the Saints were winning their game against the Packers by multiple scores (17-0, to be exact). I thought briefly about how I guessed no one won the whole Aaron Rodgers saga and that maybe the Saints were going to have a decent year after all (despite my having told people not to expect great things from Derek Carr).
I rarely write about sports other than college football here, so I’m going to give some backstory about my fandom of other sports if you’re interested. It’s going to be relevant to the topic.
College > NFL, particularly in the regular season
I don’t usually get too uptight about the NFL regular season, especially not in September. Even if I could manage to care as much about the NFL as college (even NFL players often seem more passionate about the college they went to than they are about whoever signs their paycheck at any given moment), I’ve seen too many teams go 10-6 or something like that and win the Super Bowl. If we expanded the college football playoffs to the point that 8-4 or 8-5 teams were sometimes crowned champions, I wouldn’t get as excited about college football games as I do.
Anyway, unlike some NFL fans I know who would have a coronary in this situation, I was somewhat amused as the Saints game seemed to get closer and closer every time I checked, and I was only mildly annoyed when they finally gave up the lead and then missed what should have been an easy field goal to lose. I honestly didn’t think too much about it again until the next weekend…
Saturday has been the big day for me since 1995. I mentioned a couple of blogs ago that that was the year I started doing my own top 25. It was purely subjective for the first 8 years or so, but I paid enough attention to it to know that the coaches’ and media polls were biased and misleading. Part of the reason this realization took place that year was I had begun a more difficult school (with more extracurriculars as well), and I knew I was not going to be able to enjoy two days dedicated to football as I had been. College is more fun, the big games during the day are nationally broadcast, the regular season means more (as I mentioned), and the upcoming week doesn’t concern me half the day on Saturday like it does on Sunday. Even though I had started off as more of an NFL fan (partly because the Saints were good when I first got into football, while LSU was mediocre to bad), it was an easy choice for me.
I didn’t completely ignore the NFL, but I usually just watched one game on Sunday and that was it. I could watch all the big games around the Christmas holidays. By the time the spring semester got in full swing there were only about 4 teams left in the playoffs. I always thought that was a bit of a letdown anyway. You go from about half the teams teams in the league jockeying for playoff position in the final weeks to a total of three games in three weeks.
The Other Football
Anyway, something else I gradually acquired a taste for was soccer. I didn’t give much thought to it until my parents decided it was something I should try since I didn’t excel at the big American sports. I wasn’t great at that either, but it was something to do. I gave it up after a couple of seasons; but I always enjoyed watching international competitions in a variety of sports (many of which I had never even attempted), so it was definitely included since I then understood it fairly well. Eventually, I realized there was soccer of similar quality to the World Cup being played in Europe for a good nine months out of the year. It wasn’t just something that happened for a couple of weeks every four years. So toward the end of high school, I started to follow the English Premier League and gradually became a bigger fan.
Soccer is still well behind American football in the fall; but if you want to compete for the league title, you have to be in top form starting in August. (In stark contrast to the NFL.) Since my team, Liverpool, is often in competition for league titles (or at least the top four positions), I usually make time to watch them or at least fast-forward to the good parts when there is a lull in college football games on Saturday. Since I don’t live near any of the NFL teams I like the most, I often have zero NFL games I want to see on TV, so it’s really easy to squeeze in the Sunday games.
Anyway, the Saturday following the Saints game I mentioned I woke up relatively early since I was on east coast (of Mexico) time and there had usually been some reason to get up early on my vacation. So it was an unusual case that I watched soccer before even turning on college football and didn’t fast-forward too much on a Saturday.
LSU @ Ole Miss
After the game was over, there was the LSU-Ole Miss game to watch later.
My natural range of thought is between realism and cynicism, but I still got tricked by the game trajectory of LSU-Ole Miss. You’d think if at any point you go on a 42-20 run, you’d end up winning the game. That gave LSU an 8-point edge. An exchange of touchdowns (but with a failed conversion by Ole Miss) gave LSU a 9-point lead with 8:24 to play in the fourth quarter.
I have learned many times not to take the winning percentage meter on ESPN too literally, especially when the home team is behind; but usually if it’s over 90% in the fourth quarter you’re in pretty good shape. At one point, LSU had a 94% chance of winning. That was when Ole Miss had a 3rd and 11 while trailing by 9 with 7:21 left in the game.
Conclusion: An Unlikely Combination of Disasters
Returning to earlier that day, Liverpool was wrongly denied the opening goal (the people responsible for reviewing it admitted this) and still was about 30 seconds away from salvaging a draw at Tottenham before allowing the winning goal well into stoppage time.
The previous Sunday, the Saints had had a 96.4% chance of winning midway through the fourth quarter after possibly peaking at 96.7% 2-3 minutes earlier. Not every single moment makes the chart after the game (the LSU one I mentioned didn’t, only the percentage after the preceding down), so it could have even been slightly higher at one point.
They don’t do charts like this for EPL since there are three common outcomes as opposed to ties being abolished as they are in college football and only happening once or twice a season in the NFL. But I’m sure the chances of the final score (not to mention the outcome) remaining the same well into the last minute of stoppage time is above 95%. It’s probably close to 99%, but I’ll underestimate it to make up for the overestimations that I believe the ESPN calculations do.
So the combined chance of something like this happening to three of my favorite teams in a row is about 0.0125% at best. It’s even less than that if you consider that most close games don’t have such a high percentage by either team with meaningful time left in the game. I guess the good news is a combination like this should never happen again in my lifetime. Maybe at least my memory will start to go by then and I won’t recall what happened two weeks ago.
Also, assuming it doesn’t happen again any time soon, I guess I should be relieved this series of events took place in September. It could have been really bad if LSU lost a bowl game like this, while the Saints lost an important playoff game (or game with playoff ramifications), and Liverpool had a major setback after Boxing Day (the day after Christmas).
Arkansas, Auburn, College Football, Georgia, Iowa, James Madison, Kansas, Liberty, Louisville, LSU, Memphis, Notre Dame, Ohio St., Oklahoma, Ole Miss, SEC, Texas, USC, Wisconsin, Wyoming
LSU/Mizzou & Week 6 Top 25 2023
In College Football, General LSU, History, Post-game, Preview, Rankings, Rankings Commentary on October 11, 2023 at 8:00 AMIntro
I actually have two blogs of material this week since I didn’t have time to post the other one last week. I finally did get around to entering all the FBS results into the spreadsheet for my computer formula.
I thought posting the rankings blog was more important to get more back on schedule. I haven’t even promoted them like I usually do because most people aren’t really interested on Thursday and Friday.
LSU/Missouri Recap and Reaction
I wanted to include a couple of comments about LSU’s win over Missouri even though my next blog will in part be about the game before.
It was nice to get Mizzou back for the first game after Covid, when LSU’s rising star quarterback Myles Brennan played a great game in Columbia but got hurt and was never seen in meaningful action again. I’m torn between saying LSU deserved to win that game and that LSU was lucky they competed in any games in 2020 and 2021.
Anyway, that was also the only season I know of when the LSU defense was nearly as bad as it is this year. I have barely even watched LSU play defense the last two games, by the way. Auburn’s offense isn’t as good as that of Mizzou or Ole Miss, so I’m hoping it might be more tolerable next game.
The second half of the Mizzou game was not bad though, to be fair. Six of the home Tigers’ 8 possessions did not result in points. Ideally LSU would like to force the other team to punt more, but missed field goals and interceptions result in the same number of points that “three and outs” do.
Preface of Rankings
For the rankings this week, it’s still mostly subjective; but there is an objective element now. I gave each team a score that was a combination of my subjective and objective ratings, and then I allowed myself to move teams a maximum of five spots from the order the improvised formula put them in. For most teams, it was only one or two spots though. The objective ratings aren’t as thorough as they will be (for instance, no credit was given for quality of FCS opponents), but they’re complete enough to give a strong idea of who the most accomplished teams are.
Oklahoma was the best team in my formula, but it’s partly because they beat 6 FBS opponents (none of which were very good before last week). So I felt the need to move them up considerably. I haven’t been impressed with them in “the eye test” since Caleb Williams transferred to USC, which is partly why they weren’t higher going into the week; but I couldn’t move Georgia any higher given the rules I made above. Florida St. has had two lucky wins, so I didn’t want to put them in the top 3 either.
Speaking of USC, I’m not impressed with them much at all once I sat down and looked at who they’ve beaten and the records of those opponents. They just went to triple overtime against Arizona, who lost to Mississippi St., possibly the worst team in the SEC West. The Trojans are undefeated though, so I thought I would put them ahead of the best two-loss team, Notre Dame. I would not be surprised to see USC lose to the Irish or any of the ranked Pac-12 teams though.
There were a couple of other large movements in the rankings. Louisville is another undefeated team who had a big, somewhat unexpected win over the weekend. North Carolina also made a big jump, but I am still concerned by the narrow home win over Appalachian St. One of the things I do when I move to more objective rankings is to de-emphasize margin of victory though. I added a couple of Big Ten teams with understandable losses, as well as adding LSU back.
Even though I understand it can look bad to move teams too dramatically, I still think it was the right choice to take LSU out when they fell to 2-2 against FBS opponents (which included a 3-point home win over Arkansas) going into the Missouri game. I also still think I was right to put Mizzou ahead of the four teams who fell out (as I’ll explain, formerly #21 Kansas didn’t fall far), but at any rate it makes sense for LSU to be a bit higher than those other Tigers now.
I can defend most of the choices I made last week, but the idea is to be as accurate as possible now, not to put last week on a pedestal and see who deserves to move up or down a set number of spots based on a preconceived idea of how good last week’s respective opponents were. I continue to think it’s the right thing to start evaluating teams differently around this time of year. Preseason, knee-jerk reactions to one or two early results, and margin of victory should count for very little going forward.
I’ve hardly had any teams from the G5 (those outside of the Power 5 conferences) ranked this season, but four of the best five unranked teams by both the computer and the overall formula are G5. They are as follows: James Madison, Kansas, Liberty, Memphis, and Wyoming.
I was going to leave it at that, but since I mentioned Liberty, it will be interesting to see how former Liberty and Ole Miss head coach and current Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze does in his first trip to Tiger Stadium since 2016. He was winless in three contests there as the head coach of Ole Miss, most notably in 2014 when his undefeated #3 Rebels were upset 10-7 in one of those Les Miles defensive and ball-control classics. When I get a chance, I’ll try to get caught up on the rivalry blogs.
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