Conference Power Rankings Peaks and Valleys
"What do college football fans do when they don't have games to watch? Argue about whether their schools are more virtuous than their rivals and about whether their conferences are better than specific others.
They apply history to these arguments. If your conference is up, it's because its teams have gotten their priorities in order and unlocked their resources; things will never change. If your conference is down, it's because these things are cyclical and you've just now dumped dead weight; things will soon change.
That cyclical claim is an interesting one. Do conferences really take orderly turns at the top, or are there prolonged trends that suggest long-term pecking orders?
Using the SRS stat via Sports-Reference.com, which is good enough at evaluating team strength and goes back as far as you want, here are the rolling 10-year averages for each current FBS conference. Instead of single seasons, which can mean hard-to-follow spikes in a sport without much of a sample size, 10-year averages let us see sustained strength over time."
"1953: The ACC will somehow one day be entrenched as a power despite rarely having more than one or two good teams at a time for the next 50 years. According to numbers, it was Danny Ford's overhaul at Clemson, not Florida State joining in 1992, that changed the course. It's hard to imagine the ACC as a power today minus FSU, of course. Either way, things were bad.
1971: Real bad."
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3414190/Screen_Shot_2015-02-16_at_10.47.06_AM.0.png)
I definitely plan to write about this, but for now I'll say one thing: ACC football was bush leage in the late 60's and early 70's, was pretty good when FSU first joined (GT, VA and Clemson were all still good, and UNC and NC State had their seasons). Basically the league is just now getting back to that 90's FSU level (FSU may be nearly unbeatable in conference but ACC teams actually were/are winning OOC and bowl games). Also, this graph affirms what my eyes tell me - that the ACC is roughly equal to the Big Ten, but still not up to Big XII / Pac-12 levels.
ReplyDelete