College Football Week 11: Indiana is playing for a Big Ten title. In football.

When the playoff arrives and it is time to split the loot, the Big East is no longer welcome at the cool kids' table.

http://m.espn.go.com/ncf/story?storyId=8620591

 

Good. On the rare occasion they have a team worth considering, they can go the Boise/TCU route.

 

Yes, a 42-38 squeaker on the road to an Arky team that went 11-2. Considering that A & M was a losing-record bottom-half Big 12 team that nearly beat the SEC's third best team, that game hardly makes the most compelling case for SEC superiority.

 

Crush me when this comes back to haunt me, but Mizzou has handled A&M quite well the past few years, and the spread is nothing new to them. Would be hilarious to see them win that game.

 

Dick, were last year's Alabama and LSU teams defensive-minded? Their margins of victory were huge. Your point sound like it's coming from someone who wants Notre Dame in the title game.

 

I'm not following.

Certainly a strong defensive team can also have a good offense.

Is that what you mean?

 

No, I mean to say that really dominant defensive teams control field position and even score on defense in ways Notre Dame has not consistently this year. I think the best way to measure margin of victory would be to use a sliding scale, saying a 24-point win and a 48-point win really are not very different or different at all and are more similar than a 7-point win and a 14-point win.

 

I think Notre Dame's defensive dominance is unorthodox - essentially, they are really good at not allowing touchdowns. I think that will burn them eventually, though, probably against USC.

All I'm saying is that higher-scoring games are going to create wider margins of victory. You can dominate a football game that's low-scoring. There were plenty of years in which SEC teams played these 20-10 games while the Pac 10 and Big 12 teams played pinball. Then the SEC teams smoked those teams in bowl games. Hence, I think margin of victory is a sticky wicket to use as more than just a factor larded with lots of caveats.

 

I can see the rationale for counting margin of victory up to say 20, but then you're going to get a lot of late tack-on touchdowns when a team is up 15 or 17. For damn sure Notre Dame would have when it was 21-6 against BC.

But margin of victory already does factor in, with the voting. Even on here we had a few people look at Oregon 59, Cal 17; and at Notre Dame 21, BC 6; and conclude that Oregon won more impressively than Notre Dame did. In reality, at the end of three quarters you had two teams that were ahead by three scores, and Cal actually played a much longer portion of that game within striking distance than BC did.

 

But at least theoretically humans can factor in the differences between how those two games actually played out. The computer is taking a straight number and factoring it in.

 

The game was in Dallas, not Fayettenam. Not a true road game.

 

Except that they aren't because they're not allowed to.