YeahYeah yyyyyyyeahhhhhhh.......I'd forgotten how sweet it was to beat VT in something that people pay attention to. The Radford game is tomorrow, and I this is what I wrote about it back in October: "There's the distinct possibility that this game will be needed to break a losing streak as long as six games." Instead it's likely to extend a winning streak. Coming off of two road games against theoretically better teams, how's that for a turnaround of expectations?
Expectations are what we're supposed to be keeping in check right now, but you know how hard that can be. Now there's talk of being 12-3 going into the ACC storm, starting with North Carolina. What fun, a big winning streak!
Of the teams that lie ahead, most are certainly the kind on which winning streaks are easily built. The competition gets a lot easier for the next month, but there's still three of those 50/50 type games ahead, and may I remind you we use five freshman and still rely on Mu Farrakhan's roll-of-the-dice method of shooting jumpers? I'll concede that there's the distinct possibility of seven more wins in a row, but I won't let myself expect it.
That's because if we really, really get honest with ourselves, beating VT said a lot more about VT than UVA. OK, yes, I love going into their gym and getting the job done, and Mike Scott is officially a double-double machine and an absolute rock of consistency. What we've really proven is that Tech is not a tournament team, nor are they as good as their preseason expectations. (The same can probably be said about two-thirds of the ACC, so not being part of that unfortunate group bodes very well for our chances.) Our own team is still feeling its way around the court, learning how to win. Maybe they're fast learners. Myself, I'm simply going to enjoy having something to lord over Tech again, and enjoy the ride too, without worrying too soon about where it's going.
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With good news on the basketball court and good news on the recruiting trail it's been an uplifting kind of week. The recruiting board has another orange name, O-lineman Jay Whitmire. Heavily offered, that one. A big deal for Mike London. That gives us the requisite four linemen, a number you pretty much aim for in just about every class so as to build depth where it's most needed. Whitmire looks like the best of the bunch. Changes to the board, then:
- Moved OT Jay Whitmire from blue to orange.
- In response, moved OT Donovan Smith from yellow to red. It's an open secret that Smith likes Penn State mucho, and I'm sure the coaches would take his commitment if he called tomorrow, but they're likely focusing their efforts elsewhere.
- Added WR Brandon Reddish to yellow.
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All three teams with UVA recruits won in the VHSL playoffs this weekend:
- Hermitage 42, Bayside 27
- Phoebus 21, Dinwiddie 13
- Stone Bridge 21, Osbourn 0
Hermitage plays Battlefield for the Division 6 title, and undefeated Phoebus goes against undefeated Stone Bridge in Division 5. Both games are at Scott Stadium, awesomely enough.
Phoebus may be playing without Caleb Taylor, who sustained a "leg injury" during the game. Taylor would almost certainly have redshirted next season anyway, but a long-term injury recovery would etch that in stone.
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Poll study results are also up. Relatively strong bias number this week. Last time there was one this high was for the rankings of the week of 10/23, an eventful week with Wisconsin dropping Iowa, Missouri upsetting Oklahoma, and then-#5 Auburn beating #6 LSU. (Keep in mind that if you're used to seeing the numbers higher than this, it's because I was screwing up the whole time, and found and fixed my mistake last week. That made the final bias number higher than it should have been.) This week's poll is another one in which assumptions were heavily shaken, with Boise falling to Nevada. Hypothesis: I think it's possible this is because voters see the poll results week after week and shift their votes toward the mean a little bit (as in: "hey, maybe I'm overrating so-and-so, they don't end up as high in the poll, I'll knock them back a spot or two"), until something somewhat earthshattering happens and they're forced to think for themselves. Does this actually happen? No idea. It may be something I can test in the final analysis.
Showing posts with label ap poll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ap poll. Show all posts
Monday, December 6, 2010
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
i'm an idiot
OK, this week's poll study results are up. A day late due to Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The usual etc. etc.
There is one major, important change to the numbers over the whole poll. It's like this. The first week I did this, one of the voters' ballots wasn't listed - either he forgot to send it in, or there was a glitch, or whatever. So I averaged by 59 instead of 60. The problem is, I've been doing that the whole time. When I wrote the formula to weight the regional averages, I remembered to add the extra ballot to the SEC total but not the overall total, so all the averages in the "total" column were too high. Overall gist: bias looked stronger than it really was.
It was a quick fix, but it changed the numbers around a bit and on top of that it's bloody embarrassing. Won't affect things much going forward, though, except that if you were hoping for evidence of regional bias, it's a lot less likely to occur.
There is one major, important change to the numbers over the whole poll. It's like this. The first week I did this, one of the voters' ballots wasn't listed - either he forgot to send it in, or there was a glitch, or whatever. So I averaged by 59 instead of 60. The problem is, I've been doing that the whole time. When I wrote the formula to weight the regional averages, I remembered to add the extra ballot to the SEC total but not the overall total, so all the averages in the "total" column were too high. Overall gist: bias looked stronger than it really was.
It was a quick fix, but it changed the numbers around a bit and on top of that it's bloody embarrassing. Won't affect things much going forward, though, except that if you were hoping for evidence of regional bias, it's a lot less likely to occur.
Monday, November 22, 2010
weekend review, sort of
A little abbreviated this week. Not much happened outside of football, except that all our non-rev presence in NCAA tournaments evaporated, so that wasn't too exciting. I'm saving basketball stuff for a larger post-Thanksgiving mini-extravaganza. Thanksgiving = short week. I'm not posting on damn Thanksgiving Day, I'll be too busy eating and yelling at the Lions.
Recruiting-wise, how does a new commitment sound? Mike London, with an assist from the NCAA Cloud Of Doom, flipped Daquan Romero from UNC. Just this morning, in fact. Another 757 victory for London on the recruiting trail. Romero was on the board a long time ago but committed to UNC way back in the spring and had offers from the usual regional suspects: UVA, WVU, Md., and UNC.
So the recruiting board is updated with that, plus the movement of WRs Daniel Adams and Demetri Knowles from blue to green as space in the class gets ever so limited. The sooner Demetrious Nicholson commits, the better.
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High school playoffs update:
Hanover 56, Petersburg 26 - Kevin Green lit up the box score with over 500 yards passing, as well as two touchdowns and two picks, but he still he couldn't keep pace with Hanover.
L.C. Bird 36, Highland Springs 0 - As usual, Anthony Harris didn't need to light the skies with his passing, going 5-for-8 for 112 yards and a touchdown, but Bird's offense is mostly on the ground and they'll be advancing.
Hampton 24, I.C. Norcom 0 - David Watford led Hampton to a win over Kameron Mack's crew with 179 yards passing and a touchdown.
Damascus 33, Quince Orchard 14 - Brandon Phelps caught a pair of touchdown passes to lead Damascus to a regional title.
Good Counsel 42, DeMatha 3 - Stunningly easy game for OLGC in the WCAC championship. Vincent Croce rocks the eyeblack - or eyeblue- of his favorite team:
Hermitage 28, Varina 14 (Diamonte Bailey)
Phoebus 35, Great Bridge 6 (Caleb Taylor/Daquan Romero)
Stone Bridge 36, South Lakes 15 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 42, DeMatha 3 (Vincent Croce, Kelby Johnson/Jordan Lomax)
Outlook for the rest of the year is as follows:
- Only 8 of the 23 commitments are still playing.
- Hermitage and L.C. Bird square off on Friday, so either Diamonte Bailey's or Anthony Harris's season will end. Those two haven't played this year.
- Likewise, Hampton and Phoebus also play on Friday in a matchup between David Watford's offense and the defense of Caleb Taylor and Daquan Romero. Phoebus rolled in the regular season, 37-12.
- Rob Burns and Stone Bridge take on Hayfield in the Northern Region.
- Brandon Phelps and Damascus play Wilde Lake in the MPSSAA 3A semifinals.
- The DCIAA Turkey Bowl is on Thanksgiving, but it remains to be seen who H.D. Woodson's opponent will be. Ballou won the game on the field but Dunbar is trying to get in on, essentially, a technicality.
Finally, this being my blog and this also being the high school playoff section of my blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't give you something every now and then which you don't care about in the slightest. Congratulations are in order for my alma mater, the GP South Blue Devils on reaching the Michigan state semifinals before bowing out to powerhouse Harrison. For a team that made the playoffs basically as a wild card at 5-4, pulling off a series of upsets (including one over a previously undefeated team in the regional final) to get further in the playoffs than any team in school history is a monumental achievement. If South can make the state semifinals and beat North all in the same season (believe me, it is not a football school) then there's hope for my other alma mater too.
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Wish I had something interesting to point out in the week's AP poll study results, but I don't. Such is life. However, I do have a request. At the end of the regular season I'll commence a longer look at the results with the data organized in some different ways. Here's what I have planned as of now:
- A raw count of overvotes to see which regions were most and least prone to it, as well as a count of overvotes by team to see if my theory is true: big-name teams (such as Miami or USC) tend to get more overvotes than the middle-class (such as Missouri or Stanford) or mid-majors (such as TCU.)
- A re-look at overvotes using standard deviations instead of a simple +5 standards. This might take a while.
- An overall roundup of voters' average rankings of individual teams.
- An answer to the original question: Does regional bias exist in the AP poll? Warning: Answer is not guaranteed not to be wishy-washy.
The request is this: If you can think of other ways you'd like to see the data laid out, let me know in the comments. If you've got a pet theory about the voters and a good way to test it, by all means make noise and I'll see what I can do. The more ideas, the longer it takes, of course, so I might need to make a few cuts if it gets too big, but I'll make every effort.
Recruiting-wise, how does a new commitment sound? Mike London, with an assist from the NCAA Cloud Of Doom, flipped Daquan Romero from UNC. Just this morning, in fact. Another 757 victory for London on the recruiting trail. Romero was on the board a long time ago but committed to UNC way back in the spring and had offers from the usual regional suspects: UVA, WVU, Md., and UNC.
So the recruiting board is updated with that, plus the movement of WRs Daniel Adams and Demetri Knowles from blue to green as space in the class gets ever so limited. The sooner Demetrious Nicholson commits, the better.
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High school playoffs update:
Hanover 56, Petersburg 26 - Kevin Green lit up the box score with over 500 yards passing, as well as two touchdowns and two picks, but he still he couldn't keep pace with Hanover.
L.C. Bird 36, Highland Springs 0 - As usual, Anthony Harris didn't need to light the skies with his passing, going 5-for-8 for 112 yards and a touchdown, but Bird's offense is mostly on the ground and they'll be advancing.
Hampton 24, I.C. Norcom 0 - David Watford led Hampton to a win over Kameron Mack's crew with 179 yards passing and a touchdown.
Damascus 33, Quince Orchard 14 - Brandon Phelps caught a pair of touchdown passes to lead Damascus to a regional title.
Good Counsel 42, DeMatha 3 - Stunningly easy game for OLGC in the WCAC championship. Vincent Croce rocks the eyeblack - or eyeblue- of his favorite team:
Hermitage 28, Varina 14 (Diamonte Bailey)
Phoebus 35, Great Bridge 6 (Caleb Taylor/Daquan Romero)
Stone Bridge 36, South Lakes 15 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 42, DeMatha 3 (Vincent Croce, Kelby Johnson/Jordan Lomax)
Outlook for the rest of the year is as follows:
- Only 8 of the 23 commitments are still playing.
- Hermitage and L.C. Bird square off on Friday, so either Diamonte Bailey's or Anthony Harris's season will end. Those two haven't played this year.
- Likewise, Hampton and Phoebus also play on Friday in a matchup between David Watford's offense and the defense of Caleb Taylor and Daquan Romero. Phoebus rolled in the regular season, 37-12.
- Rob Burns and Stone Bridge take on Hayfield in the Northern Region.
- Brandon Phelps and Damascus play Wilde Lake in the MPSSAA 3A semifinals.
- The DCIAA Turkey Bowl is on Thanksgiving, but it remains to be seen who H.D. Woodson's opponent will be. Ballou won the game on the field but Dunbar is trying to get in on, essentially, a technicality.
Finally, this being my blog and this also being the high school playoff section of my blog, I'd be remiss if I didn't give you something every now and then which you don't care about in the slightest. Congratulations are in order for my alma mater, the GP South Blue Devils on reaching the Michigan state semifinals before bowing out to powerhouse Harrison. For a team that made the playoffs basically as a wild card at 5-4, pulling off a series of upsets (including one over a previously undefeated team in the regional final) to get further in the playoffs than any team in school history is a monumental achievement. If South can make the state semifinals and beat North all in the same season (believe me, it is not a football school) then there's hope for my other alma mater too.
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Wish I had something interesting to point out in the week's AP poll study results, but I don't. Such is life. However, I do have a request. At the end of the regular season I'll commence a longer look at the results with the data organized in some different ways. Here's what I have planned as of now:
- A raw count of overvotes to see which regions were most and least prone to it, as well as a count of overvotes by team to see if my theory is true: big-name teams (such as Miami or USC) tend to get more overvotes than the middle-class (such as Missouri or Stanford) or mid-majors (such as TCU.)
- A re-look at overvotes using standard deviations instead of a simple +5 standards. This might take a while.
- An overall roundup of voters' average rankings of individual teams.
- An answer to the original question: Does regional bias exist in the AP poll? Warning: Answer is not guaranteed not to be wishy-washy.
The request is this: If you can think of other ways you'd like to see the data laid out, let me know in the comments. If you've got a pet theory about the voters and a good way to test it, by all means make noise and I'll see what I can do. The more ideas, the longer it takes, of course, so I might need to make a few cuts if it gets too big, but I'll make every effort.
Monday, November 8, 2010
weekend review
Today you'll see something you haven't seen for well over three months: a new addition to the orange section of the recruiting board. Hard to believe it's been that long, but the staff can't just take the first commitment that comes along any more. Quite a week for movement; here are the changes:
- LB D.J. Hill is your 22nd member of the class, and moves to orange.
- As a result, LB Troy Gray drops to yellow from green. I have serious doubts the staff would take a commitment from him any more, with Hill on board and two more linebacker prospects they're trying like hell to get.
- WR Darius Jennings moves from yellow to green as UVA makes a top six.
- DE Norkeithus Otis is removed after committing to UNC. He was in the red section; any removals from the red section caused by commitments usually are dudes that dropped UVA long ago.
There's no guarantee of any early enrollees, so the yearly limit of 25 could come into play here. (Anyone who enrolled early would count toward last year's wide-open class for NCAA purposes.) The total limit of 85 is another concern, of course, and it's the latter limit that's causing the staff to take it very, very slow. For that reason, anyone on the yellow section should be thought of as having at least a foot in the red. It would neither surprise me nor bother me much if, until there were some changes, the only players the staff would accept a commitment from right now are those bolded in orange.
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Euro-football! The reason soccer doesn't get the coverage I want to give it is because college soccer gets no TV coverage whatsoever and it's really damn hard - in fact, it's basically a totally fruitless exercise - to offer any kind of opinion based only on the stat sheet. Which in soccer is very slim.
Really, ESPNU is a great channel, except in the fall where it's little more than another football outlet. This makes it totally useless for all but about six of a 168-hour week. During the ACC soccer tournament, ESPNU will be showing "SEC Weekly," for the college football fan that can't get enough gasbagging about Auburn's chances of going undefeated.
Anyway, maybe you wouldn't want very much coverage of the team, as the title defense campaign hasn't gone smoothly for the young roster. Though highly ranked, they haven't fared well against other ranked teams, beating only St. John's in the early going and losing to or tieing every ranked ACC foe. The result is a 6-seed in the ACC tournament, which starts Wednesday, and a date with an extremely familiar foe: Wake Forest. Wake won the regular season meeting 1-0 at Klockner.
The ACC championship is every other day; the final is Sunday. The ladies team has a second-seed draw in the NCAA and will play on Friday against Lehigh. Unlikely that the men's team will have as favorable a seeding unless they make a serious ACC run. As with usual, the only actual broadcast TV won't be til the semifinals.
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November brings high school playoffs, or at least the end of the regular season. Time to check in on the commitments, including the first new addition of the whole season:
L.C. Bird 19, Manchester 13: Anthony Harris threw for one of Bird's touchdowns and caught a 79-yarder for another one. Harris normally quarterbacks Bird and throws about five or six passes a game; handing off to his running back is his primary job.
Petersburg 34, Colonial Heights 26: Could've been a better defensive effort against a 2-7 team, but Kevin Green is the quarterback and the offense did its thing. Green ran for three touchdowns and two 2PC's in the win.
St. Christopher's 35, Collegiate 28: Just one catch for 12 yards for Thompson Brown, but St. Christopher's got a huge win over a longtime tormentor. There'll be a rematch next week in the playoffs.
Cox 10, First Colonial 7: Ross Burbank runs for Cox's lone touchdown. Burbank's stints at running back have helped propel Cox into the playoffs, where they'll likely be slaughtered but hey.
St. Albans 31, St. S/St. A 7: Darius Lee catches a 35-yarder for his team's only touchdown in the season finale.
Damascus 39, Kennedy 0: Brandon Phelps catches two passes for 48 yards and a touchdown; Damascus finishes the regular season unbeaten.
Hermitage 54, Thomas Jefferson 15 (Diamonte Bailey)
Booker T. Washington 41, I.C. Norcom 39 (Kameron Mack)
Phoebus 60, Bethel 7 (Caleb Taylor)
Hampton 54, Menchville 0 (David Watford, Clifton Richardson)
Stone Bridge 49, South Lakes 13 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 42, Archibishop Carroll 0 (Vincent Croce)
DeMatha 48, Bishop McNamara 6 (Kelby Johnson/Jordan Lomax)
H.D. Woodson 46, Anacostia 0 (Darius Redman)
Boys' Latin 28, St. Paul's 12 (Marco Jones)
Butler 61, Independence 6 (Adrian Gamble)
Mt. Lebanon 35, Plum 14 (Tim Cwalina - playoff game)
Newton 28, Luella 20 (D.J. Hill)
Now for the playoffs. The season is over for five of our players:
David Dean (Green Run): Finished 5-5.
Adrian Gamble (Independence (NC)): Independence is normally one of Charlotte's powerhouses, but not this year.
D.J. Hill (Newton (GA)): Newton started on a long win streak, and then went on a long losing streak. The end-of-year win wasn't enough.
Darius Lee (St. Stephen's & St. Agnes): Finished 1-8.
Clifton Richardson (Menchville): One of the 757's weakest programs, Menchville's coach stepped down after this season ended, their fifth straight two-win season.
Three of our commits play in the Richmond area and thus have one more game before the regular season is over. That'd be Diamonte Bailey at Hermitage, Kevin Green at Petersburg, and Anthony Harris at Bird. All three will make the playoffs.
Here's how the playoff matchups look for everyone else:
In Pennsylvania:
Mt. Lebanon and Tim Cwalina play in Western PA's highest level, Quad-A, and their first playoff game in the WPIAL was this weekend - a win over Plum. Three more weeks of WPIAL playoffs will be followed by the playoffs in Pennsylvania at large; Mt. Lebanon is the second-seeded team in the WPIAL Quad-A bracket and stands as good a chance as anyone of getting there.
In DC:
- H.D. Woodson has a make-up game to play on Tuesday, but they needed to lose this past weekend in order to miss out on a bye in the DCIAA playoffs. They get the weekend off and then the loser of the Dunbar/Coolidge game this weekend.
In Maryland:
- Marco Jones and Boys' Latin are in the MIAA's B Conference, the middle of three. Their playoffs are a three-team bracket of eastern Maryland private schools; Boys' Latin will have to beat Archbishop Curley to get to the championship game. Boys' Latin beat Curley 21-7 way back in September.
- The WCAC four-team bracket is a beast every year. DeMatha beat Good Counsel earlier in the year and so wins the tiebreaker for top seed; they'll face St. John's, whom they beat 21-14 in October. Good Counsel has a tougher road, facing Gonzaga in the semis. That was a 50-38 win for Good Counsel earlier, but Gonzaga did upset DeMatha earlier this season and they have Kevin Hogan at quarterback, whom UVA recruited hard but lost to Stanford.
- Brandon Phelps is UVA's lone public-schooler from Maryland. Damascus is undefeated and starts their journey through the 3A bracket (MD's second-highest classification) in the 3A West regional semis against Linganore.
In Virginia:
- In the Eastern Region, Division 5 sees Phoebus (Caleb Taylor) seeded #1, Hampton (David Watford) seeded #2, and I.C. Norcom (Kameron Mack) seeded #3. Phoebus plays Warwick (a 49-6 win in September), Hampton plays Lake Taylor, and Norcom plays Churchland (a 20-14 win in October.) Churchland stands between a Watford/Mack matchup in the second round; Phoebus is easily the favorite of the bracket.
- Division 6 of the same region features Ross Burbank and Cox, who'll take first crack at upsetting unbeaten Bayside.
- Rob Burns and undefeated Stone Bridge drew JEB Stuart in the first round of their Northern Region bracket.
- St. Christopher's gets a rematch with Collegiate in the VIS Division I semis.
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Another week means another round of AP poll postings. Not many changes or surprises, with the notable exception of voters overvoting the hell out of their regional teams this past week. Over one-third of overvotes came from home-region voters this week; if that were a trend, I'd say it's pretty significant, but it's more of an outlier. I don't expect it to last, but this week at least, the vast majority of the "also receiving votes" section of the poll got them from overenthusiastic regional voters.
Basketball season. Friday. Yeah. William & Mary. How about that? Even though having six freshmen in the rotation makes it really friggin' tough to try and make any sense of how the season will shake out, we'll make some attempt at that this week anyway. ACC team previews come later, after football is done but before the real ACC season begins in January.
- LB D.J. Hill is your 22nd member of the class, and moves to orange.
- As a result, LB Troy Gray drops to yellow from green. I have serious doubts the staff would take a commitment from him any more, with Hill on board and two more linebacker prospects they're trying like hell to get.
- WR Darius Jennings moves from yellow to green as UVA makes a top six.
- DE Norkeithus Otis is removed after committing to UNC. He was in the red section; any removals from the red section caused by commitments usually are dudes that dropped UVA long ago.
There's no guarantee of any early enrollees, so the yearly limit of 25 could come into play here. (Anyone who enrolled early would count toward last year's wide-open class for NCAA purposes.) The total limit of 85 is another concern, of course, and it's the latter limit that's causing the staff to take it very, very slow. For that reason, anyone on the yellow section should be thought of as having at least a foot in the red. It would neither surprise me nor bother me much if, until there were some changes, the only players the staff would accept a commitment from right now are those bolded in orange.
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Euro-football! The reason soccer doesn't get the coverage I want to give it is because college soccer gets no TV coverage whatsoever and it's really damn hard - in fact, it's basically a totally fruitless exercise - to offer any kind of opinion based only on the stat sheet. Which in soccer is very slim.
Really, ESPNU is a great channel, except in the fall where it's little more than another football outlet. This makes it totally useless for all but about six of a 168-hour week. During the ACC soccer tournament, ESPNU will be showing "SEC Weekly," for the college football fan that can't get enough gasbagging about Auburn's chances of going undefeated.
Anyway, maybe you wouldn't want very much coverage of the team, as the title defense campaign hasn't gone smoothly for the young roster. Though highly ranked, they haven't fared well against other ranked teams, beating only St. John's in the early going and losing to or tieing every ranked ACC foe. The result is a 6-seed in the ACC tournament, which starts Wednesday, and a date with an extremely familiar foe: Wake Forest. Wake won the regular season meeting 1-0 at Klockner.
The ACC championship is every other day; the final is Sunday. The ladies team has a second-seed draw in the NCAA and will play on Friday against Lehigh. Unlikely that the men's team will have as favorable a seeding unless they make a serious ACC run. As with usual, the only actual broadcast TV won't be til the semifinals.
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November brings high school playoffs, or at least the end of the regular season. Time to check in on the commitments, including the first new addition of the whole season:
L.C. Bird 19, Manchester 13: Anthony Harris threw for one of Bird's touchdowns and caught a 79-yarder for another one. Harris normally quarterbacks Bird and throws about five or six passes a game; handing off to his running back is his primary job.
Petersburg 34, Colonial Heights 26: Could've been a better defensive effort against a 2-7 team, but Kevin Green is the quarterback and the offense did its thing. Green ran for three touchdowns and two 2PC's in the win.
St. Christopher's 35, Collegiate 28: Just one catch for 12 yards for Thompson Brown, but St. Christopher's got a huge win over a longtime tormentor. There'll be a rematch next week in the playoffs.
Cox 10, First Colonial 7: Ross Burbank runs for Cox's lone touchdown. Burbank's stints at running back have helped propel Cox into the playoffs, where they'll likely be slaughtered but hey.
St. Albans 31, St. S/St. A 7: Darius Lee catches a 35-yarder for his team's only touchdown in the season finale.
Damascus 39, Kennedy 0: Brandon Phelps catches two passes for 48 yards and a touchdown; Damascus finishes the regular season unbeaten.
Hermitage 54, Thomas Jefferson 15 (Diamonte Bailey)
Booker T. Washington 41, I.C. Norcom 39 (Kameron Mack)
Phoebus 60, Bethel 7 (Caleb Taylor)
Hampton 54, Menchville 0 (David Watford, Clifton Richardson)
Stone Bridge 49, South Lakes 13 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 42, Archibishop Carroll 0 (Vincent Croce)
DeMatha 48, Bishop McNamara 6 (Kelby Johnson/Jordan Lomax)
H.D. Woodson 46, Anacostia 0 (Darius Redman)
Boys' Latin 28, St. Paul's 12 (Marco Jones)
Butler 61, Independence 6 (Adrian Gamble)
Mt. Lebanon 35, Plum 14 (Tim Cwalina - playoff game)
Newton 28, Luella 20 (D.J. Hill)
Now for the playoffs. The season is over for five of our players:
David Dean (Green Run): Finished 5-5.
Adrian Gamble (Independence (NC)): Independence is normally one of Charlotte's powerhouses, but not this year.
D.J. Hill (Newton (GA)): Newton started on a long win streak, and then went on a long losing streak. The end-of-year win wasn't enough.
Darius Lee (St. Stephen's & St. Agnes): Finished 1-8.
Clifton Richardson (Menchville): One of the 757's weakest programs, Menchville's coach stepped down after this season ended, their fifth straight two-win season.
Three of our commits play in the Richmond area and thus have one more game before the regular season is over. That'd be Diamonte Bailey at Hermitage, Kevin Green at Petersburg, and Anthony Harris at Bird. All three will make the playoffs.
Here's how the playoff matchups look for everyone else:
In Pennsylvania:
Mt. Lebanon and Tim Cwalina play in Western PA's highest level, Quad-A, and their first playoff game in the WPIAL was this weekend - a win over Plum. Three more weeks of WPIAL playoffs will be followed by the playoffs in Pennsylvania at large; Mt. Lebanon is the second-seeded team in the WPIAL Quad-A bracket and stands as good a chance as anyone of getting there.
In DC:
- H.D. Woodson has a make-up game to play on Tuesday, but they needed to lose this past weekend in order to miss out on a bye in the DCIAA playoffs. They get the weekend off and then the loser of the Dunbar/Coolidge game this weekend.
In Maryland:
- Marco Jones and Boys' Latin are in the MIAA's B Conference, the middle of three. Their playoffs are a three-team bracket of eastern Maryland private schools; Boys' Latin will have to beat Archbishop Curley to get to the championship game. Boys' Latin beat Curley 21-7 way back in September.
- The WCAC four-team bracket is a beast every year. DeMatha beat Good Counsel earlier in the year and so wins the tiebreaker for top seed; they'll face St. John's, whom they beat 21-14 in October. Good Counsel has a tougher road, facing Gonzaga in the semis. That was a 50-38 win for Good Counsel earlier, but Gonzaga did upset DeMatha earlier this season and they have Kevin Hogan at quarterback, whom UVA recruited hard but lost to Stanford.
- Brandon Phelps is UVA's lone public-schooler from Maryland. Damascus is undefeated and starts their journey through the 3A bracket (MD's second-highest classification) in the 3A West regional semis against Linganore.
In Virginia:
- In the Eastern Region, Division 5 sees Phoebus (Caleb Taylor) seeded #1, Hampton (David Watford) seeded #2, and I.C. Norcom (Kameron Mack) seeded #3. Phoebus plays Warwick (a 49-6 win in September), Hampton plays Lake Taylor, and Norcom plays Churchland (a 20-14 win in October.) Churchland stands between a Watford/Mack matchup in the second round; Phoebus is easily the favorite of the bracket.
- Division 6 of the same region features Ross Burbank and Cox, who'll take first crack at upsetting unbeaten Bayside.
- Rob Burns and undefeated Stone Bridge drew JEB Stuart in the first round of their Northern Region bracket.
- St. Christopher's gets a rematch with Collegiate in the VIS Division I semis.
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Another week means another round of AP poll postings. Not many changes or surprises, with the notable exception of voters overvoting the hell out of their regional teams this past week. Over one-third of overvotes came from home-region voters this week; if that were a trend, I'd say it's pretty significant, but it's more of an outlier. I don't expect it to last, but this week at least, the vast majority of the "also receiving votes" section of the poll got them from overenthusiastic regional voters.
Basketball season. Friday. Yeah. William & Mary. How about that? Even though having six freshmen in the rotation makes it really friggin' tough to try and make any sense of how the season will shake out, we'll make some attempt at that this week anyway. ACC team previews come later, after football is done but before the real ACC season begins in January.
Monday, November 1, 2010
weekend review
Lot of movement on the recruiting board this week. Is some of it just wishful thinking on my part? Maybe. Probably. But it is what it is, I'm just taking it one recruit at a time, just trying to give 110%.
- Moving up: LB Curtis Grant from red to green, LB Travis Hughes from yellow to green, CB Demetrious Nicholson from green to blue. Green is where Grant will stick. I had this conviction that UVA would still be in the hunt when Grant got to decision time, I waffled on it, I'm sticking with my guns now. Grant will have UVA in the back of his head, and at the very least, if he goes instate it'll be UVA and not Tech.
As for Nicholson and Hughes, surely they liked what they saw on Saturday, yes? Remember, with Hughes, he'd dropped UVA from the picture until they went to California and played USC tough. Then he started talking top five and official visits, and he bumped LSU - yes, LSU - to make room for the Hoos. If he liked what he saw at USC, no doubt the Miami game was worth his while.
- Moving down: TE Rory Anderson and LB Troy Gray from blue to green. Gray was supposed to be one of the official visitors on Saturday and didn't go.
- Removed: LB Sean Duggan, off to Boston College. Disappointing but unsurprising.
**************************************
Nothing major in the world of news, so it's time to check on the high school seniors:
Woodberry Forest 31, St. Christopher's 16: Thompson Brown catches a touchdown in the loss.
Petersburg 44, Prince George 6: Kevin Green passed for 140 yards and ran for 116 and two touchdowns plus a 2PC.
Cox 21, Ocean Lakes 14: OL Ross Burbank, all 300 pounds of him, carries the ball 12 times and scores all three Cox touchdowns in the upset; Cox hands Ocean Lakes just their second loss of the season.
Good Counsel 50, Gonzaga 38: Vincent Croce caught a pass, his fourth of the season and first since September 4. (He's an occasional pass-catching tight end.)
Damascus 39, Clarksburg 0: Good to see Brandon Phelps getting back on the offensive side of the ball. A bad hip has limited him to defense most of the season. This week, he caught six passes for 55 yards and a touchdown, and Damascus clinched top seed in the West Region playoffs.
Hermitage 40, John Marshall 0 (Diamonte Bailey)
L.C. Bird 42, George Wythe 6 (Anthony Harris)
I.C. Norcom 29, Lake Taylor 0 (Kameron Mack)
Phoebus 56, Denbigh 6 (Caleb Taylor)
Kellam 24, Green Run 21 (David Dean)
Hampton 14, Kecoughtan 3 (David Watford)
Menchville 16, Heritage 6 (Clifton Richardson)
Stone Bridge 38, McLean 0 (Rob Burns)
H.D. Woodson 48, Eastern 0 (Darius Redman)
DeMatha 41, Archbishop Carroll 0 (Jordan Lomax, Kelby Johnson)
Myers Park 31, Independence 26 (Adrian Gamble)
Boys' Latin 34, John Carroll 14 (Marco Jones)
Mt. Lebanon 14, Upper St. Clair 10 (Tim Cwalina)
That concludes two regular seasons: David Dean's Green Run and Tim Cwalina's Mt. Lebanon. Dean and Green Run are done for the year; they needed that win against a bad Kellam team to stay alive for the playoffs. Cwalina and Mt. Lebanon finish undefeated and will take on Plum in the first round of the WPIAL (western Pa.) AAAA-level playoffs. They're cruising for a rematch with Upper St. Clair in the WPIAL semis. That's a four-week bracket; it's followed by the statewide tournament.
**************************************
I've also got the AP poll study results for the week on the appropriate page. Again, a new record for regional bias is the result. Had I placed Utah in the Big 12 region instead of the Pac-10 region - a borderline call to be sure - we'd see over half a point of regional bias this week. As it is, it's close to it.
It's getting harder and harder to ignore that there just might be proof of regional bias in the rankings. I'm holding off on any full-bore data analysis until after the final regular season poll comes out, but this is the fourth straight week of seeing an increase in the overall bias number - the one you see on the bottom right of the "averages" chart. SEC voters are notoriously in the tank for Auburn. (I voted them #1 too, so I don't think they're necessarily wrong, but they're strongly against conventional wisdom.) Nearly a full point ahead of the rest of the country in their voting for Auburn - that is a very, very large number that high in the poll. The Pac-10 voters might appear to be underrating Oregon, but it's largely in favor of Boise State instead. I could go on, but have a look yourself.
- Moving up: LB Curtis Grant from red to green, LB Travis Hughes from yellow to green, CB Demetrious Nicholson from green to blue. Green is where Grant will stick. I had this conviction that UVA would still be in the hunt when Grant got to decision time, I waffled on it, I'm sticking with my guns now. Grant will have UVA in the back of his head, and at the very least, if he goes instate it'll be UVA and not Tech.
As for Nicholson and Hughes, surely they liked what they saw on Saturday, yes? Remember, with Hughes, he'd dropped UVA from the picture until they went to California and played USC tough. Then he started talking top five and official visits, and he bumped LSU - yes, LSU - to make room for the Hoos. If he liked what he saw at USC, no doubt the Miami game was worth his while.
- Moving down: TE Rory Anderson and LB Troy Gray from blue to green. Gray was supposed to be one of the official visitors on Saturday and didn't go.
- Removed: LB Sean Duggan, off to Boston College. Disappointing but unsurprising.
**************************************
Nothing major in the world of news, so it's time to check on the high school seniors:
Woodberry Forest 31, St. Christopher's 16: Thompson Brown catches a touchdown in the loss.
Petersburg 44, Prince George 6: Kevin Green passed for 140 yards and ran for 116 and two touchdowns plus a 2PC.
Cox 21, Ocean Lakes 14: OL Ross Burbank, all 300 pounds of him, carries the ball 12 times and scores all three Cox touchdowns in the upset; Cox hands Ocean Lakes just their second loss of the season.
Good Counsel 50, Gonzaga 38: Vincent Croce caught a pass, his fourth of the season and first since September 4. (He's an occasional pass-catching tight end.)
Damascus 39, Clarksburg 0: Good to see Brandon Phelps getting back on the offensive side of the ball. A bad hip has limited him to defense most of the season. This week, he caught six passes for 55 yards and a touchdown, and Damascus clinched top seed in the West Region playoffs.
Hermitage 40, John Marshall 0 (Diamonte Bailey)
L.C. Bird 42, George Wythe 6 (Anthony Harris)
I.C. Norcom 29, Lake Taylor 0 (Kameron Mack)
Phoebus 56, Denbigh 6 (Caleb Taylor)
Kellam 24, Green Run 21 (David Dean)
Hampton 14, Kecoughtan 3 (David Watford)
Menchville 16, Heritage 6 (Clifton Richardson)
Stone Bridge 38, McLean 0 (Rob Burns)
H.D. Woodson 48, Eastern 0 (Darius Redman)
DeMatha 41, Archbishop Carroll 0 (Jordan Lomax, Kelby Johnson)
Myers Park 31, Independence 26 (Adrian Gamble)
Boys' Latin 34, John Carroll 14 (Marco Jones)
Mt. Lebanon 14, Upper St. Clair 10 (Tim Cwalina)
That concludes two regular seasons: David Dean's Green Run and Tim Cwalina's Mt. Lebanon. Dean and Green Run are done for the year; they needed that win against a bad Kellam team to stay alive for the playoffs. Cwalina and Mt. Lebanon finish undefeated and will take on Plum in the first round of the WPIAL (western Pa.) AAAA-level playoffs. They're cruising for a rematch with Upper St. Clair in the WPIAL semis. That's a four-week bracket; it's followed by the statewide tournament.
**************************************
I've also got the AP poll study results for the week on the appropriate page. Again, a new record for regional bias is the result. Had I placed Utah in the Big 12 region instead of the Pac-10 region - a borderline call to be sure - we'd see over half a point of regional bias this week. As it is, it's close to it.
It's getting harder and harder to ignore that there just might be proof of regional bias in the rankings. I'm holding off on any full-bore data analysis until after the final regular season poll comes out, but this is the fourth straight week of seeing an increase in the overall bias number - the one you see on the bottom right of the "averages" chart. SEC voters are notoriously in the tank for Auburn. (I voted them #1 too, so I don't think they're necessarily wrong, but they're strongly against conventional wisdom.) Nearly a full point ahead of the rest of the country in their voting for Auburn - that is a very, very large number that high in the poll. The Pac-10 voters might appear to be underrating Oregon, but it's largely in favor of Boise State instead. I could go on, but have a look yourself.
Monday, October 25, 2010
weekend review
Short update this week as far as the recruiting board goes. Just the addition of WR Timmy Keith and some readability fixes.
The depth chart is a lot more interesting. The bad news there is that I'm not gonna put in the actual changes til later in the week. The good news is that intrigue abounds. It's an intriguing web of intrigue.
- First off, Morgan Moses is now so huge, and awesome at football, that he's the starter at not one, but two positions. The whole right side of the line is his. Tackle and guard.
Lot of ORs running around, as in "Morgan Moses OR Oday Aboushi" at right tackle. Right guard is "Morgan Moses OR B.J. Cabbell," and left tackle is "Oday Aboushi OR Landon Bradley." The interpretation is clear: If Bradley can play and be effective with a huge cast on his hand (following his hand surgery) that turns it into a club, then Bradley will start at LT, Aboushi at RT, and Moses at RG. If not, Aboushi moves to LT, Moses mans the other tackle spot, and Cabbell hangs on to his starting gig for one more week.
Either way, the writing that was on the wall a couple weeks ago is thisclose to collecting on its promise: Cabbell will be a backup sooner rather than later, and Moses is getting his job. Bradley was a whipping boy of mine last year, but his play has improved to a level resembling acceptable. I like Moses better at guard, which is his obvious long-term home. I don't have much of a preference for this week, having not the faintest idea how comfortable Bradley can be without the ability to grip with one hand. It's his right hand, which speeds his return - a left tackle could never protect the edge without his left hand.
- Linebacker is another fun story. Aaron Taliaferro is on the outside now - the strong side backup behind Laroy Reynolds. Is Mr. Lazarus (so nicknamed in camp because of his rise from the dead) headed back to the figurative tomb? Darnell Carter moves over to replace Taliaferro as the half-starter in the middle with Steve Greer.
Editorial: I'd like to see more time for Greer. He wasn't the team's leading tackler as a freshman for nothing. Teams don't run around the edge on Virginia for nothing. The tackles aren't being missed in the middle.
**********************************************
Newsy stuff this week is one item only: RIP Fran Crippen. Former UVA swimmer and older brother of current UVA swimmer Claire Crippen. His death during a 10K swim race in the UAE is all over the news.
Perhaps a former swimmer who's been to that part of the world (me, if you're unclear) can clarify a few things for curious readers?
First, I'm not going to place as much blame on FINA (the worldwide governing body for swimming) as the media is looking to. Water that's too warm is really hard to come by. Swim meets are typically held in cold-ass water, because cold water is faster. Warm water relaxes the muscles. The temperature of open-water events obviously isn't controlled, but having regulations for swimming in water that's too warm is like having regulations for ski hills that aren't steep enough. Bad for competition, bad for your times, why would you worry about it? It's likely the strongest amount of blame should be placed on the meet organizers for a lack of decent safety procedures.
After all, your average marathon has tons of precautions against health issues. A 10K swim race is eons more demanding than a marathon. It's like an Ironman Triathlon. Blame, if you must call it that, can fall squarely on Crippen's shoulders for continuing despite not feeling well, but besides the shortest of the shortest of sprints, full-body fatigue is par for the course for swimmers. It's not like basketball or football where you can be subbed out. Just you and your body, and if you don't drag yourself out of the pool after an event - especially a distance event - with every muscle burning like hellfire, then you didn't swim hard enough. You get out and never want to move again. Laying on the pool deck in just your swimsuit for the rest of your life sounds just fine. Crippen can't have been expected to know the difference between the extreme fatigue he'd normally feel at the end of a 10K and life-threatening exhaustion.
Which is why FINA and the Emiratis are being total dicks about this. Callously blaming it on "overexertion." Yes, it's probably true. But if they were real swimming officials they'd know overexertion is pretty much normal. The whole field was overexerting themselves.
As for the water temperature, again with the dickitude in insisting the water was "only" 84 degrees. As if there's this huge lifesaving difference in the three degrees between that and the 87 degrees that the swimmers are saying. I've been to the UAE. On a ship, which wouldn't you know, we made it our business to know what the water temperature was. (You have to in order to keep the machinery running properly.) In the Persian Gulf itself, the water temps were in the mid-90s; close to shore and in-port, they never dropped below 100. 102, 103, usually. Granted, I was there in July, not October. Granted, Fujairah, where the event was held (not Dubai, as the reports sometimes claim), is outside the Gulf - that makes a difference, the water is warmer, saltier, and way grodier and jellyfishier inside. All the same, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if an official inquest finds the water was above 90. It's the fucking desert.
**************************************
Alright, let's move on and check in on the senior seasons. Here in Michigan, it's already playoff time for the high schoolers. (Go GP South Blue Devils.) One more week of games and that'll be true for Pennsylvania, too. Maryland and North Carolina, two more weeks; Virginia, three. We'll keep you updated throughout, of course.
L.C. Bird 14, Clover Hill 13: Bird puts the ball in the hands of their running backs for the most part (Anthony Harris only threw five passes and completed three), but when they trailed 13-0 in the second half they turned to their best athlete. Harris scored both Bird touchdowns, the winner on fourth down, and Bird pulled out the win with a goal-line stand.
Dinwiddie 33, Petersburg 21: Kevin Green came out on the short end of a good old-fashioned quarterback duel. Green ran for 127 yards and two TDs and completed 17-of-36 for 160 more, plus another touchdown. He was also picked off twice in the loss; the winning QB, whose stats were equally gaudy, is VT commit Chris Hall.
Phoebus 37, Hampton 12: Caleb Taylor's defense held David Watford in check. Watford was just 5-of-18 passing. He ran for an early touchdown to cut the score to 10-6, and threw another one in garbage time.
H.D. Woodson 22, Ballou 20: Darius Redman helped to seal a big upset by intercepting a pass with 90 seconds left. Then he nearly blew it by getting greedy and trying to return it for six; the ball was stripped and Redman had to go back on defense. D'oh. Time for a little coaching moment. Redman also caught an 8-yard touchdown pass.
Hermitage 48, Douglas Freeman 0 (Diamonte Bailey)
I.C. Norcom 48, Granby 7 (Kameron Mack)
Cox 22, First Colonial 20 (Ross Burbank)
Green Run 34, First Colonial 28 (David Dean)
Bethel 42, Menchville 10 (Clifton Richardson)
Episcopal 19, St. Christopher's 15 (Thompson Brown)
Landon (Md.) 22, St. S/St. A 0 (Darius Lee)
Damascus 35, Northwood 16 (Brandon Phelps)
Stone Bridge 50, Langley 10 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 37, St. John's 14 (Vincent Croce)
DeMatha 39, Bishop O'Connell 17 (Jordan Lomax, Kelby Johnson)
Independence 62, Rocky River 17 (Adrian Gamble)
Mt. Lebanon 27, Peters Township 16 (Tim Cwalina)
That is it for now. Later in the week: basketball! That time of year. Weird, huh? Football season announces its presence in such a way that it's impossible to miss, even if you try. Basketball season goes "um, hi."
Wait, no. That's not it for now. Also there is the AP poll study, in which the appearance of bias grows steadily stronger. Teaser: only three of 25 teams did not get any regional help, and the West Coast voters are off the hook this week. See the archive page for the rest.
The depth chart is a lot more interesting. The bad news there is that I'm not gonna put in the actual changes til later in the week. The good news is that intrigue abounds. It's an intriguing web of intrigue.
- First off, Morgan Moses is now so huge, and awesome at football, that he's the starter at not one, but two positions. The whole right side of the line is his. Tackle and guard.
Lot of ORs running around, as in "Morgan Moses OR Oday Aboushi" at right tackle. Right guard is "Morgan Moses OR B.J. Cabbell," and left tackle is "Oday Aboushi OR Landon Bradley." The interpretation is clear: If Bradley can play and be effective with a huge cast on his hand (following his hand surgery) that turns it into a club, then Bradley will start at LT, Aboushi at RT, and Moses at RG. If not, Aboushi moves to LT, Moses mans the other tackle spot, and Cabbell hangs on to his starting gig for one more week.
Either way, the writing that was on the wall a couple weeks ago is thisclose to collecting on its promise: Cabbell will be a backup sooner rather than later, and Moses is getting his job. Bradley was a whipping boy of mine last year, but his play has improved to a level resembling acceptable. I like Moses better at guard, which is his obvious long-term home. I don't have much of a preference for this week, having not the faintest idea how comfortable Bradley can be without the ability to grip with one hand. It's his right hand, which speeds his return - a left tackle could never protect the edge without his left hand.
- Linebacker is another fun story. Aaron Taliaferro is on the outside now - the strong side backup behind Laroy Reynolds. Is Mr. Lazarus (so nicknamed in camp because of his rise from the dead) headed back to the figurative tomb? Darnell Carter moves over to replace Taliaferro as the half-starter in the middle with Steve Greer.
Editorial: I'd like to see more time for Greer. He wasn't the team's leading tackler as a freshman for nothing. Teams don't run around the edge on Virginia for nothing. The tackles aren't being missed in the middle.
**********************************************
Newsy stuff this week is one item only: RIP Fran Crippen. Former UVA swimmer and older brother of current UVA swimmer Claire Crippen. His death during a 10K swim race in the UAE is all over the news.
Perhaps a former swimmer who's been to that part of the world (me, if you're unclear) can clarify a few things for curious readers?
First, I'm not going to place as much blame on FINA (the worldwide governing body for swimming) as the media is looking to. Water that's too warm is really hard to come by. Swim meets are typically held in cold-ass water, because cold water is faster. Warm water relaxes the muscles. The temperature of open-water events obviously isn't controlled, but having regulations for swimming in water that's too warm is like having regulations for ski hills that aren't steep enough. Bad for competition, bad for your times, why would you worry about it? It's likely the strongest amount of blame should be placed on the meet organizers for a lack of decent safety procedures.
After all, your average marathon has tons of precautions against health issues. A 10K swim race is eons more demanding than a marathon. It's like an Ironman Triathlon. Blame, if you must call it that, can fall squarely on Crippen's shoulders for continuing despite not feeling well, but besides the shortest of the shortest of sprints, full-body fatigue is par for the course for swimmers. It's not like basketball or football where you can be subbed out. Just you and your body, and if you don't drag yourself out of the pool after an event - especially a distance event - with every muscle burning like hellfire, then you didn't swim hard enough. You get out and never want to move again. Laying on the pool deck in just your swimsuit for the rest of your life sounds just fine. Crippen can't have been expected to know the difference between the extreme fatigue he'd normally feel at the end of a 10K and life-threatening exhaustion.
Which is why FINA and the Emiratis are being total dicks about this. Callously blaming it on "overexertion." Yes, it's probably true. But if they were real swimming officials they'd know overexertion is pretty much normal. The whole field was overexerting themselves.
As for the water temperature, again with the dickitude in insisting the water was "only" 84 degrees. As if there's this huge lifesaving difference in the three degrees between that and the 87 degrees that the swimmers are saying. I've been to the UAE. On a ship, which wouldn't you know, we made it our business to know what the water temperature was. (You have to in order to keep the machinery running properly.) In the Persian Gulf itself, the water temps were in the mid-90s; close to shore and in-port, they never dropped below 100. 102, 103, usually. Granted, I was there in July, not October. Granted, Fujairah, where the event was held (not Dubai, as the reports sometimes claim), is outside the Gulf - that makes a difference, the water is warmer, saltier, and way grodier and jellyfishier inside. All the same, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if an official inquest finds the water was above 90. It's the fucking desert.
**************************************
Alright, let's move on and check in on the senior seasons. Here in Michigan, it's already playoff time for the high schoolers. (Go GP South Blue Devils.) One more week of games and that'll be true for Pennsylvania, too. Maryland and North Carolina, two more weeks; Virginia, three. We'll keep you updated throughout, of course.
L.C. Bird 14, Clover Hill 13: Bird puts the ball in the hands of their running backs for the most part (Anthony Harris only threw five passes and completed three), but when they trailed 13-0 in the second half they turned to their best athlete. Harris scored both Bird touchdowns, the winner on fourth down, and Bird pulled out the win with a goal-line stand.
Dinwiddie 33, Petersburg 21: Kevin Green came out on the short end of a good old-fashioned quarterback duel. Green ran for 127 yards and two TDs and completed 17-of-36 for 160 more, plus another touchdown. He was also picked off twice in the loss; the winning QB, whose stats were equally gaudy, is VT commit Chris Hall.
Phoebus 37, Hampton 12: Caleb Taylor's defense held David Watford in check. Watford was just 5-of-18 passing. He ran for an early touchdown to cut the score to 10-6, and threw another one in garbage time.
H.D. Woodson 22, Ballou 20: Darius Redman helped to seal a big upset by intercepting a pass with 90 seconds left. Then he nearly blew it by getting greedy and trying to return it for six; the ball was stripped and Redman had to go back on defense. D'oh. Time for a little coaching moment. Redman also caught an 8-yard touchdown pass.
Hermitage 48, Douglas Freeman 0 (Diamonte Bailey)
I.C. Norcom 48, Granby 7 (Kameron Mack)
Cox 22, First Colonial 20 (Ross Burbank)
Green Run 34, First Colonial 28 (David Dean)
Bethel 42, Menchville 10 (Clifton Richardson)
Episcopal 19, St. Christopher's 15 (Thompson Brown)
Landon (Md.) 22, St. S/St. A 0 (Darius Lee)
Damascus 35, Northwood 16 (Brandon Phelps)
Stone Bridge 50, Langley 10 (Rob Burns)
Good Counsel 37, St. John's 14 (Vincent Croce)
DeMatha 39, Bishop O'Connell 17 (Jordan Lomax, Kelby Johnson)
Independence 62, Rocky River 17 (Adrian Gamble)
Mt. Lebanon 27, Peters Township 16 (Tim Cwalina)
That is it for now. Later in the week: basketball! That time of year. Weird, huh? Football season announces its presence in such a way that it's impossible to miss, even if you try. Basketball season goes "um, hi."
Wait, no. That's not it for now. Also there is the AP poll study, in which the appearance of bias grows steadily stronger. Teaser: only three of 25 teams did not get any regional help, and the West Coast voters are off the hook this week. See the archive page for the rest.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
ongoing AP poll study
My ongoing project for the current football year is this: to determine if there is any regional bias affecting the Associated Press Top 25 rankings. My interest was piqued when I read the AP's guidelines to its voters, which include telling them expressly not to include such a bias in their ballot. It seems like they shouldn't have to be told that; I suspect that guideline exists to calm the public, which harbors a suspicion.
This page is the storehouse for the weekly results as I publish them. If you're unfamiliar with what I'm doing, this page is a must-read in order to understand the charts below. Keep in mind these come out a week after the rankings they analyze.
Week of 9/11:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 9/18:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 9/25:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/2:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/9:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/16:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/23:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/30:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/6:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/13:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/20:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/27:
Overvotes
Averages
This page is the storehouse for the weekly results as I publish them. If you're unfamiliar with what I'm doing, this page is a must-read in order to understand the charts below. Keep in mind these come out a week after the rankings they analyze.
Week of 9/11:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 9/18:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 9/25:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/2:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/9:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/16:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/23:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 10/30:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/6:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/13:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/20:
Overvotes
Averages
Week of 11/27:
Overvotes
Averages
Monday, October 4, 2010
weekend review
Monday again. That means it's time to update the recruiting board, yep. Lot of shuffling....
- Moved CB Demetrious Nicholson and LB Sean Duggan from yellow to blue. In Nicholson's case it's because UNC, which looked so strong in this recruitment earlier, is starting to look like a really lousy place for a football player to spend the next four or five years of his life. In Duggan's case it's because Wisconsin dropped off the list. BC and Michigan are still gonna be tough to contend with, though.
- Moved LB Travis Hughes from red to yellow. I still don't think he'll end up here, but he seems serious. If he does, it'll be the greatest recruiting resurrection ever pulled at UVA.
- Moved QB Lafonte Thourogood from yellow to red. Starting to get the "it ain't happening" feeling.
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Newsy things:
- UNC's Kendric Burney is officially out for the UVA game, having lost his appeal. At the rate things are going, it doesn't look likely that most of the rest of their parked players will be on the field, either, though Deunta Williams is back this week. That's a very winnable game.
- The UNC game will be at 6 PM, online, no TV. Speaking as someone who's still working on ways to get recordings of online games: argh.
- Michael Phillips suggests that JKD is still listed as the DT starter mainly because he's a senior captain, and says that Matt Conrath is getting the first snaps. But, JKD was out there a lot on first downs against FSU. Unless Conrath was banged up - wouldn't have been evident either way from the ESPN3 broadcast - JKD is still getting the meaningful snaps.
- The lead guy at CavsCorner, Chris Wallace, mentioned that some numbnuts at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked this question of Mike London: "What changes have you made since taking over as head coach?" (I would have told him the only thing I did was paint the equipment shed, just to see what he prints.) This must be the guy:
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High school senior seasons march on:
STAB 13, St. Christopher's 7: Thompson Brown's been having a really good season, but kept off the stat sheet here.
L.C. Bird 21, Monacan 13: Anthony Harris throws the go-ahead touchdown.
Hermitage 19, Deep Run 0: Diamonte Bailey assists in another Hermitage shutout.
Thomas Dale 12, Petersburg 8: Maybe a little rust as Kevin Green and Petersburg have had three straight weekends off.
>I.C. Norcom 45, Norview 0: Kameron Mack still rolling, and earning the shutout.
St. S/St. A 40, Randolph-Macon 0: Gotta like the shutouts our future defenders keep getting. This one belongs to Darius Lee.
Menchville 31, Gloucester 3: Clifton Richardson QBs his team to their first win of the season. Very nice to see. And he's homecoming king, too!
Phoebus 50, Woodside 10: #1-in-the-state Phoebus and Caleb Taylor crush a solid Woodside bunch.
Tallwood 14, Green Run 6: David Dean's team upset as Tallwood gets their first win of the year.
Cox 21, Princess Anne 17: Ross Burbank helps pave the way for a solid 200-plus yard night for Cox's running game.
Hampton 33, Warwick 0: Another easy one for David Watford.
Gonzaga 32, DeMatha 25: Upset loss for Kelby Johnson and Jordan Lomax. And UVA was recruiting that Gonzaga quarterback (Kevin Hogan) pretty heavily, too.
Damascus 35, Springbrook 14: Big win for Brandon Phelps against an undefeated team.
Stone Bridge 63, Marshall 7: Man....these teams never passed. Rob Burns in on the defensive shutdown but never got to rush the quarterback.
Good Counsel 48, Bishop McNamara 0: Vincent Croce pitches in on the shutout; prospect Blake Countess does a lot of the scoring.
Independence 51, Ardrey Kell 30: Adrian Gamble catches four passes for 125 yards.
Boys' Latin 45, St. Frances 0: Yep, another shutout. Marco Jones this time. SF is awful though.
Mt. Lebanon 35, Canon-McMillan 12: It's really hard to find your offensive linemen in the high school box scores, but at least Tim Cwalina keeps winning.
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I've decided to put the ongoing AP poll study in this section. I might give this its own page, but for this week this is what we're doing. Remember: these lag a week, so this is from last Sunday's poll. So here are this week's results. For explanation, please read here.
Trends that continue:
- If there's a team likely to be way overvoted, it's probably a big-name team. Less so this week, but man look at Texas. This is largely the result of voters either keeping them in the middle-ish of the poll after a hideous loss against UCLA, or kicking them out entirely.
- And if there's a group of writers most likely to hold a bias, it's probably West Coasters. Except....look what they did to Oregon. SEC voters ranked Oregon second, and Pac-10 voters had them damn near 7th. Very weird. Probably a one-time-only thing.
Regionalism continues to appear most strongly below the top 25, with conference-regional voters being the main driving force behind the appearance of teams like Northwestern, Oregon State, UCLA, and Missouri in the "also getting votes" section. Additionally, strong bias is evident from 21-25, with four of those five teams getting a huge boost from conference voters. Remember, at the bottom, higher differences in average ratings are harder to achieve, so the delta numbers for teams like NC State, Nevada, and MSU are significant.
However, overall, if you were trying to claim bias permeated this week's poll, you'd have only weak evidence to go on. Other than the almost omnipresent tendency of West Coast voters to overrate West Coast teams, everything else seems to be close to a random distribution again. Tune in next week, then.
- Moved CB Demetrious Nicholson and LB Sean Duggan from yellow to blue. In Nicholson's case it's because UNC, which looked so strong in this recruitment earlier, is starting to look like a really lousy place for a football player to spend the next four or five years of his life. In Duggan's case it's because Wisconsin dropped off the list. BC and Michigan are still gonna be tough to contend with, though.
- Moved LB Travis Hughes from red to yellow. I still don't think he'll end up here, but he seems serious. If he does, it'll be the greatest recruiting resurrection ever pulled at UVA.
- Moved QB Lafonte Thourogood from yellow to red. Starting to get the "it ain't happening" feeling.
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Newsy things:
- UNC's Kendric Burney is officially out for the UVA game, having lost his appeal. At the rate things are going, it doesn't look likely that most of the rest of their parked players will be on the field, either, though Deunta Williams is back this week. That's a very winnable game.
- The UNC game will be at 6 PM, online, no TV. Speaking as someone who's still working on ways to get recordings of online games: argh.
- Michael Phillips suggests that JKD is still listed as the DT starter mainly because he's a senior captain, and says that Matt Conrath is getting the first snaps. But, JKD was out there a lot on first downs against FSU. Unless Conrath was banged up - wouldn't have been evident either way from the ESPN3 broadcast - JKD is still getting the meaningful snaps.
- The lead guy at CavsCorner, Chris Wallace, mentioned that some numbnuts at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked this question of Mike London: "What changes have you made since taking over as head coach?" (I would have told him the only thing I did was paint the equipment shed, just to see what he prints.) This must be the guy:
Both Virginia and Groh have moved on. London, the first African-American coach in the history of Virginia athletics, has brought excitement to a program needing a boost.Mr. Huff? Dave Leitao for you on line 1. It's no wonder the newspaper industry is slowly disappearing and practically every major newspaper in the country is, like the AJC, a hyphenated combination of two papers that would have failed on their own. I realize he's only one coach off, but this is a basic, fundamental statement of a plain fact that is plain wrong, and this man is somehow paid actual legal tender to do less research for his job than I do for my hobby, which is this blog that mucks around with an audience that is occasionally measured as low as the mere dozens. As opposed to the (theoretically) millions that get their information from his paper.
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High school senior seasons march on:
STAB 13, St. Christopher's 7: Thompson Brown's been having a really good season, but kept off the stat sheet here.
L.C. Bird 21, Monacan 13: Anthony Harris throws the go-ahead touchdown.
Hermitage 19, Deep Run 0: Diamonte Bailey assists in another Hermitage shutout.
Thomas Dale 12, Petersburg 8: Maybe a little rust as Kevin Green and Petersburg have had three straight weekends off.
>I.C. Norcom 45, Norview 0: Kameron Mack still rolling, and earning the shutout.
St. S/St. A 40, Randolph-Macon 0: Gotta like the shutouts our future defenders keep getting. This one belongs to Darius Lee.
Menchville 31, Gloucester 3: Clifton Richardson QBs his team to their first win of the season. Very nice to see. And he's homecoming king, too!
Phoebus 50, Woodside 10: #1-in-the-state Phoebus and Caleb Taylor crush a solid Woodside bunch.
Tallwood 14, Green Run 6: David Dean's team upset as Tallwood gets their first win of the year.
Cox 21, Princess Anne 17: Ross Burbank helps pave the way for a solid 200-plus yard night for Cox's running game.
Hampton 33, Warwick 0: Another easy one for David Watford.
Gonzaga 32, DeMatha 25: Upset loss for Kelby Johnson and Jordan Lomax. And UVA was recruiting that Gonzaga quarterback (Kevin Hogan) pretty heavily, too.
Damascus 35, Springbrook 14: Big win for Brandon Phelps against an undefeated team.
Stone Bridge 63, Marshall 7: Man....these teams never passed. Rob Burns in on the defensive shutdown but never got to rush the quarterback.
Good Counsel 48, Bishop McNamara 0: Vincent Croce pitches in on the shutout; prospect Blake Countess does a lot of the scoring.
Independence 51, Ardrey Kell 30: Adrian Gamble catches four passes for 125 yards.
Boys' Latin 45, St. Frances 0: Yep, another shutout. Marco Jones this time. SF is awful though.
Mt. Lebanon 35, Canon-McMillan 12: It's really hard to find your offensive linemen in the high school box scores, but at least Tim Cwalina keeps winning.
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I've decided to put the ongoing AP poll study in this section. I might give this its own page, but for this week this is what we're doing. Remember: these lag a week, so this is from last Sunday's poll. So here are this week's results. For explanation, please read here.
Trends that continue:
- If there's a team likely to be way overvoted, it's probably a big-name team. Less so this week, but man look at Texas. This is largely the result of voters either keeping them in the middle-ish of the poll after a hideous loss against UCLA, or kicking them out entirely.
- And if there's a group of writers most likely to hold a bias, it's probably West Coasters. Except....look what they did to Oregon. SEC voters ranked Oregon second, and Pac-10 voters had them damn near 7th. Very weird. Probably a one-time-only thing.
Regionalism continues to appear most strongly below the top 25, with conference-regional voters being the main driving force behind the appearance of teams like Northwestern, Oregon State, UCLA, and Missouri in the "also getting votes" section. Additionally, strong bias is evident from 21-25, with four of those five teams getting a huge boost from conference voters. Remember, at the bottom, higher differences in average ratings are harder to achieve, so the delta numbers for teams like NC State, Nevada, and MSU are significant.
However, overall, if you were trying to claim bias permeated this week's poll, you'd have only weak evidence to go on. Other than the almost omnipresent tendency of West Coast voters to overrate West Coast teams, everything else seems to be close to a random distribution again. Tune in next week, then.
Monday, September 27, 2010
regional bias study, second week
If you haven't seen last week's look at the AP poll to study it for regional bias, check that out, to get up to speed and for instructions on reading the charts. Here are this week's:
Chart 1 displays what I referred to as "overvotes" - that is, the number of times a team was ranked in a ballot five places or more than their actual poll ranking. Chart 2 displays the averages. Keep in mind, these are the votes from the poll that came out on September 21, not yesterday.
Some trends from last week continue.
- Marquee teams like Oklahoma, Florida, USC, and Michigan are far more likely to get overvotes than non-name teams.
- Pac-10-area voters are generally more guilty than most of overrating teams from their own region, though not quite as strongly as last week.
- The strongest evidence of regional bias continues to be located in the area of the poll below the top 25 where the simple act of voting for a team at all constitutes overrating them. The four teams ranked from 30th-33rd - Fresno State, Missouri, Oklahoma State, and Clemson - get the lion's share of their votes from their home regions. Particularly Fresno State - good lord the West Coast voters are shameless in their support for the Bulldogs. However, in the top 25 itself, there appears to be little evidence outside the West Coast (and even that is rather weak) that regional bias is manifest.
One trend that disappeared this week was the one-vote teams: last week, the vast majority of them received their lone vote from regional voters. This week that isn't the case.
The averages chart is very interesting, though. Had those numbers shown up last week it would have really perked my ears up for regional biases. Last week the distribution looked about 100% random. This week there's some noticeable upvoting for regional teams. The average "bias" is to rank teams a third of a place higher than the rest of the country - a small number to be sure, but there are just eight teams out of 25 that didn't receive favorable reviews from their home region writers. It'll be interesting to see, going forward, whether last week's trend (basically zero bias in the top 25) or this week's holds true.
Chart 1 displays what I referred to as "overvotes" - that is, the number of times a team was ranked in a ballot five places or more than their actual poll ranking. Chart 2 displays the averages. Keep in mind, these are the votes from the poll that came out on September 21, not yesterday.
Some trends from last week continue.
- Marquee teams like Oklahoma, Florida, USC, and Michigan are far more likely to get overvotes than non-name teams.
- Pac-10-area voters are generally more guilty than most of overrating teams from their own region, though not quite as strongly as last week.
- The strongest evidence of regional bias continues to be located in the area of the poll below the top 25 where the simple act of voting for a team at all constitutes overrating them. The four teams ranked from 30th-33rd - Fresno State, Missouri, Oklahoma State, and Clemson - get the lion's share of their votes from their home regions. Particularly Fresno State - good lord the West Coast voters are shameless in their support for the Bulldogs. However, in the top 25 itself, there appears to be little evidence outside the West Coast (and even that is rather weak) that regional bias is manifest.
One trend that disappeared this week was the one-vote teams: last week, the vast majority of them received their lone vote from regional voters. This week that isn't the case.
The averages chart is very interesting, though. Had those numbers shown up last week it would have really perked my ears up for regional biases. Last week the distribution looked about 100% random. This week there's some noticeable upvoting for regional teams. The average "bias" is to rank teams a third of a place higher than the rest of the country - a small number to be sure, but there are just eight teams out of 25 that didn't receive favorable reviews from their home region writers. It'll be interesting to see, going forward, whether last week's trend (basically zero bias in the top 25) or this week's holds true.
Monday, September 20, 2010
regional bias in the AP poll?
If there's one thing college football fans like to do besides watch their team win, it's bitch about their team getting screwed. And besides referees, what better place is there to get screwed than in the polls? We're all sure that someone's out to get us, particularly Pac-10 fans who are convinced of an East Coast bias. The Michigan fan in me doesn't know whether or not Phil Fulmer actually did vote Michigan 6th after their undefeated 1997 season in retaliation for having his quarterback lose the Heisman to Charles Woodson, but sure likes to believe it anyway.
So, I took it upon myself to see if this bias actually exists, at least in the AP poll. These results use last week's poll, the individual results of which can be found here, or they could until the new poll came out anyway. Wish I knew where they kept poll archives, but anyway I started this last week so what I have works. Obviously one week's poll isn't a sample size worth having, so the results of this little experiment don't say anything about the poll in general. But I think they do say something about last week.
Methodology: There are 60 ballots in the AP poll, and I divided them up into regions based on the six BCS conferences. There are five national-media ballots in a separate category, and I also created a "crossover" category for voters whose newspaper doesn't fall into just one region - for example, the Macon Telegraph and St. Pete Times which could be ACC or SEC or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which could be Big Ten or Big East. I thought about putting them in both categories, but I wanted to make sure that when averaging things out, each poll was only counted once. Still, in certain places where it makes logical sense to do so, these crossover ballots are counted in both their two regions.
Teams getting votes also fall into these regions; most are in the actual BCS conferences so their placement is easy, and others like Fresno State or Houston get placed wherever seems logical. (In those two cases, Fresno State is considered Pac-10 and Houston is considered Big 12.) And in this little study, the rankings are considered to extend to every team that got votes, so Pittsburgh, for example, is considered to be ranked 26th since they were the team not in the top 25 who still got the most votes.
The hypothesis to be tested is that yes, some regional bias exists. It seems logical to think so: your local beat writer concerns himself first with the team he covers and then with the teams they're likely to play. On Saturdays he's probably not flipping idly through the channels for the most entertaining game, he's doing work. He's in the press box, and if he follows any out-of-town scores, they're probably next week's opponent. He knows Florida and USC and Oklahoma, of course, but he's got deadlines and crap all weekend and doesn't take the time to really get deep and weigh the intracacies of Oregon State against Auburn.
Hell, I admit to a little regional bias when I vote, which usually manifests itself more strongly in the early going and tends to disappear by about halfway through the season as the data gets more extensive. Why? Because by the time it's time to vote, I know all about the ridiculous experience on FSU's O-line and the depth in Clemson's secondary and all of that, and nothing even remotely close to that about any other conference except maybe the Big Ten. The preseason ballot methodology of adding up points based on the trophy watch lists was an attempt to mitigate that.
So I set upon two different ways of testing regional bias in the poll. The first is born of the occasional accusation that poll voters either believe their region is superior (the SEC comes to mind, and you can't blame people if they think the SEC media is biased), or try to hype up "their" teams based on a rooting interest or simply to sell papers.
You can certainly see where people get this idea. The second-highest vote for 26th-ranked Pittsburgh? Came from Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The only vote for NC State? From Bill Cole of the Winston-Salem Journal. The poll isn't exactly saturated with this stuff, but there's enough anecdotal evidence for people to seize on.
So, I simply counted what I called "overvotes," which are defined as any time a team got a vote five or more places higher than where it was actually ranked. The chart below shows the results. Here's how to read it:
- Each row delineates a team, and each column delineates a region. The numbers are the numbers of overvotes by region. For example: South Carolina appeared on three ballots at least five places higher than their final ranking of 13th; that is, 8th or higher. One of those was a Pac-10 media outlet, one was an ACC outlet, and one was a Big Ten outlet.
- Yellow highlights indicate where a regional outlet overvoted a team from its own region. For example: Two Pac-10 outlets overvoted Utah.
- The first bold black line indicates the end of the top 25 and the beginning of the "also receiving votes" teams; the second is those teams ranked below 29th and hence, simply voting for them is an overvote.
- At the bottom are the number of outlets in each region; this is placed to show you why it's no surprise that (for example) the Big 12 has the most overvotes. I didn't average them out, it's not necessary.
Things that stuck out:
- The first thing that jumped out at me was the identity of the teams that got the most overvotes. In the top 25: Michigan, USC, Florida. Outside it: Georgia, Florida State. These are the outliers. Except for Georgia (and Georgia fans would probably vehemently disagree so they count half): blue-blood, big-name teams all. Could it be that voters do indeed have at least a subconscious bias that, obvious things like record being equal, a team named Michigan or USC is probably better than one named Stanford or Wisconsin?
- The rough bell-curve-ish appearance of the totals shouldn't be a surprise, nor should the fact that a disproportionate number - over a third - of the overvotes are for teams for whom simply ranking them is an overvote. Keep this in mind when contemplating the large number of yellow highlights in that area.
- Florida got a huge number of overvotes, especially for their position in the poll (9th) where it's really hard to do that. Yet none are from the SEC. More on that later.
So is there a regional bias in this poll?
In general, no. It took until the 14th-ranked team to find an overvote from the same region as the team. Of the 75 overvotes for top-25 teams, just 8, or 10.7%, are regionally-based; of the 193 total overvotes, just 38, or 19.7%, are regionally-based. That's about what you'd expect if they were randomly scattered.
However, there are some interesting data points which merit another look:
- In the top 29 teams - where a team must get a vote higher than 25th in order for it to be an over-vote - the prevalence of Pac-10 teams getting overvotes from Pac-10 media is noteworthy. Five teams from the Pac-10 region (Utah, USC, Stanford, Fresno State, Cal) get Pac-10 media overvotes. The only regions to even give a single overvote to a team from their region are the Big Ten (three to Michigan) and the Big 12 (one to Air Force.) One team each; those are the only other instance of a region's media overvoting a team from that region. And it should also be pointed out that of Air Force's five overvotes, three came from Pac-10 outlets.
It's also worth noting that Fresno State appeared on 10 total ballots, 5 of which were Pac-10 ballots.
This does seem a decent indicator of West Coast bias toward its own teams; the West Coast version of these events would be that this is proof of East Coast bias, as East Coast media doesn't have a handle on the quality of these teams because they're on late and not being watched.
- Of the five teams ranked 30-34 - that is, the five highest ones for whom a single vote is an overvote - a significant number of their votes come from their home region media:
Georgia: 5 of 15 overvotes come from SEC papers, twice the 10-of-60 rate of SEC representation (two are in the crossover category.) Georgia also received one-third of their total points from SEC papers.
Missouri: 3 of 9 overvotes from Big 12 outlets, again approximately twice the representation rate.
Clemson: a whopping 5 of 8 overvotes, and 18 of their 25 points, from ACC media.
Overall: 32% of these five teams' overvotes (Florida State and Georgia Tech also included) from home-region media, a huge number compared to the percentages of other teams' overvotes. More than twice the similar percentage outside these five teams.
- Of the four teams receiving just one vote (Baylor, Boston College, NC State, Northwestern) three of them received it from their home region.
So there's definitely an indication that regional bias occurs at times, though the poll at large doesn't seem greatly affected by it. So we go to the second method, asking the question: Is there a pattern of regional media ranking "their" teams higher, on average, than the rest of the country? I calculated the average ranking for each team in each region, and the overall average, to find the answer. The second chart is below. Reading guide:
- Only the top 25 teams this time. Again, row = team, column = region.
- There's a yellow or orange highlight to indicate a team's average in their home region. Yellow means the average ranking was lower than the national average, orange means the average ranking was higher.
- Red and green on the ends mean the same thing: If the team's average ranking from home media was higher, the box is green; if it was lower, red.
- The bottom number in the Delta column is the average of the differences.
- 26 is the rank assigned to all teams unranked in a ballot, by the reasoning that had I tallied points instead of averages as the AP does, unranked teams would all get zero.
Things that stick out:
- Florida is graded very severely by the SEC and national media, as compared to the rest of the country. By far the hugest negative delta. Do they know something everyone else doesn't?
- You'd expect smaller delta numbers at the top and bottom. It's a lot easier to create huge variance below the top-ranked teams, because you can move teams off the low end of the poll but not the high end. And there's almost always some consensus as to who the top-five teams are, but very little as to who is #15-20. As for the low end, all unranked teams get assigned #26 because voters don't rank below #25, so that too allows for less variation. So LSU's number is not too extraordinary, but Arizona's, while very similar, is actually really surprising.
That said, the only possible conclusion from this chart: Regional bias does not affect the top 25, at least in the Week 2 poll.
Sure, there are some outliers, and some anecdotal evidence of it. South Carolina is treated very kindly by SEC voters, and Utah gets similar special treatment from Pac-10 voters. But the yellow and orange, the red and green, and the average delta, don't lie. There are 12 teams with negative delta and 13 with positive, and the average is a very small number. It's pretty strongly suggestive of a random distribution, even to this D- scholar in statistics. What I expected to see was a consistent pattern of small positive differences between a team's average rank in all ballots and their average rank in home region ballots, not a near-random bell curve-ish distribution.
Even so, there are enough signs of regional bias creeping into certain elements of the poll that make this worth watching. And one week, as I said, is a really lame sample size. So I do intend to make this an every-week thing. I say "intend to" rather than "will" because I "intend" to do a lot of things that don't happen. But this is the kind of worthy project that I'm pretty good about sticking with.
So, I took it upon myself to see if this bias actually exists, at least in the AP poll. These results use last week's poll, the individual results of which can be found here, or they could until the new poll came out anyway. Wish I knew where they kept poll archives, but anyway I started this last week so what I have works. Obviously one week's poll isn't a sample size worth having, so the results of this little experiment don't say anything about the poll in general. But I think they do say something about last week.
Methodology: There are 60 ballots in the AP poll, and I divided them up into regions based on the six BCS conferences. There are five national-media ballots in a separate category, and I also created a "crossover" category for voters whose newspaper doesn't fall into just one region - for example, the Macon Telegraph and St. Pete Times which could be ACC or SEC or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which could be Big Ten or Big East. I thought about putting them in both categories, but I wanted to make sure that when averaging things out, each poll was only counted once. Still, in certain places where it makes logical sense to do so, these crossover ballots are counted in both their two regions.
Teams getting votes also fall into these regions; most are in the actual BCS conferences so their placement is easy, and others like Fresno State or Houston get placed wherever seems logical. (In those two cases, Fresno State is considered Pac-10 and Houston is considered Big 12.) And in this little study, the rankings are considered to extend to every team that got votes, so Pittsburgh, for example, is considered to be ranked 26th since they were the team not in the top 25 who still got the most votes.
The hypothesis to be tested is that yes, some regional bias exists. It seems logical to think so: your local beat writer concerns himself first with the team he covers and then with the teams they're likely to play. On Saturdays he's probably not flipping idly through the channels for the most entertaining game, he's doing work. He's in the press box, and if he follows any out-of-town scores, they're probably next week's opponent. He knows Florida and USC and Oklahoma, of course, but he's got deadlines and crap all weekend and doesn't take the time to really get deep and weigh the intracacies of Oregon State against Auburn.
Hell, I admit to a little regional bias when I vote, which usually manifests itself more strongly in the early going and tends to disappear by about halfway through the season as the data gets more extensive. Why? Because by the time it's time to vote, I know all about the ridiculous experience on FSU's O-line and the depth in Clemson's secondary and all of that, and nothing even remotely close to that about any other conference except maybe the Big Ten. The preseason ballot methodology of adding up points based on the trophy watch lists was an attempt to mitigate that.
So I set upon two different ways of testing regional bias in the poll. The first is born of the occasional accusation that poll voters either believe their region is superior (the SEC comes to mind, and you can't blame people if they think the SEC media is biased), or try to hype up "their" teams based on a rooting interest or simply to sell papers.
You can certainly see where people get this idea. The second-highest vote for 26th-ranked Pittsburgh? Came from Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The only vote for NC State? From Bill Cole of the Winston-Salem Journal. The poll isn't exactly saturated with this stuff, but there's enough anecdotal evidence for people to seize on.
So, I simply counted what I called "overvotes," which are defined as any time a team got a vote five or more places higher than where it was actually ranked. The chart below shows the results. Here's how to read it:
- Each row delineates a team, and each column delineates a region. The numbers are the numbers of overvotes by region. For example: South Carolina appeared on three ballots at least five places higher than their final ranking of 13th; that is, 8th or higher. One of those was a Pac-10 media outlet, one was an ACC outlet, and one was a Big Ten outlet.
- Yellow highlights indicate where a regional outlet overvoted a team from its own region. For example: Two Pac-10 outlets overvoted Utah.
- The first bold black line indicates the end of the top 25 and the beginning of the "also receiving votes" teams; the second is those teams ranked below 29th and hence, simply voting for them is an overvote.
- At the bottom are the number of outlets in each region; this is placed to show you why it's no surprise that (for example) the Big 12 has the most overvotes. I didn't average them out, it's not necessary.
Things that stuck out:
- The first thing that jumped out at me was the identity of the teams that got the most overvotes. In the top 25: Michigan, USC, Florida. Outside it: Georgia, Florida State. These are the outliers. Except for Georgia (and Georgia fans would probably vehemently disagree so they count half): blue-blood, big-name teams all. Could it be that voters do indeed have at least a subconscious bias that, obvious things like record being equal, a team named Michigan or USC is probably better than one named Stanford or Wisconsin?
- The rough bell-curve-ish appearance of the totals shouldn't be a surprise, nor should the fact that a disproportionate number - over a third - of the overvotes are for teams for whom simply ranking them is an overvote. Keep this in mind when contemplating the large number of yellow highlights in that area.
- Florida got a huge number of overvotes, especially for their position in the poll (9th) where it's really hard to do that. Yet none are from the SEC. More on that later.
So is there a regional bias in this poll?
In general, no. It took until the 14th-ranked team to find an overvote from the same region as the team. Of the 75 overvotes for top-25 teams, just 8, or 10.7%, are regionally-based; of the 193 total overvotes, just 38, or 19.7%, are regionally-based. That's about what you'd expect if they were randomly scattered.
However, there are some interesting data points which merit another look:
- In the top 29 teams - where a team must get a vote higher than 25th in order for it to be an over-vote - the prevalence of Pac-10 teams getting overvotes from Pac-10 media is noteworthy. Five teams from the Pac-10 region (Utah, USC, Stanford, Fresno State, Cal) get Pac-10 media overvotes. The only regions to even give a single overvote to a team from their region are the Big Ten (three to Michigan) and the Big 12 (one to Air Force.) One team each; those are the only other instance of a region's media overvoting a team from that region. And it should also be pointed out that of Air Force's five overvotes, three came from Pac-10 outlets.
It's also worth noting that Fresno State appeared on 10 total ballots, 5 of which were Pac-10 ballots.
This does seem a decent indicator of West Coast bias toward its own teams; the West Coast version of these events would be that this is proof of East Coast bias, as East Coast media doesn't have a handle on the quality of these teams because they're on late and not being watched.
- Of the five teams ranked 30-34 - that is, the five highest ones for whom a single vote is an overvote - a significant number of their votes come from their home region media:
Georgia: 5 of 15 overvotes come from SEC papers, twice the 10-of-60 rate of SEC representation (two are in the crossover category.) Georgia also received one-third of their total points from SEC papers.
Missouri: 3 of 9 overvotes from Big 12 outlets, again approximately twice the representation rate.
Clemson: a whopping 5 of 8 overvotes, and 18 of their 25 points, from ACC media.
Overall: 32% of these five teams' overvotes (Florida State and Georgia Tech also included) from home-region media, a huge number compared to the percentages of other teams' overvotes. More than twice the similar percentage outside these five teams.
- Of the four teams receiving just one vote (Baylor, Boston College, NC State, Northwestern) three of them received it from their home region.
So there's definitely an indication that regional bias occurs at times, though the poll at large doesn't seem greatly affected by it. So we go to the second method, asking the question: Is there a pattern of regional media ranking "their" teams higher, on average, than the rest of the country? I calculated the average ranking for each team in each region, and the overall average, to find the answer. The second chart is below. Reading guide:
- Only the top 25 teams this time. Again, row = team, column = region.
- There's a yellow or orange highlight to indicate a team's average in their home region. Yellow means the average ranking was lower than the national average, orange means the average ranking was higher.
- Red and green on the ends mean the same thing: If the team's average ranking from home media was higher, the box is green; if it was lower, red.
- The bottom number in the Delta column is the average of the differences.
- 26 is the rank assigned to all teams unranked in a ballot, by the reasoning that had I tallied points instead of averages as the AP does, unranked teams would all get zero.
Things that stick out:
- Florida is graded very severely by the SEC and national media, as compared to the rest of the country. By far the hugest negative delta. Do they know something everyone else doesn't?
- You'd expect smaller delta numbers at the top and bottom. It's a lot easier to create huge variance below the top-ranked teams, because you can move teams off the low end of the poll but not the high end. And there's almost always some consensus as to who the top-five teams are, but very little as to who is #15-20. As for the low end, all unranked teams get assigned #26 because voters don't rank below #25, so that too allows for less variation. So LSU's number is not too extraordinary, but Arizona's, while very similar, is actually really surprising.
That said, the only possible conclusion from this chart: Regional bias does not affect the top 25, at least in the Week 2 poll.
Sure, there are some outliers, and some anecdotal evidence of it. South Carolina is treated very kindly by SEC voters, and Utah gets similar special treatment from Pac-10 voters. But the yellow and orange, the red and green, and the average delta, don't lie. There are 12 teams with negative delta and 13 with positive, and the average is a very small number. It's pretty strongly suggestive of a random distribution, even to this D- scholar in statistics. What I expected to see was a consistent pattern of small positive differences between a team's average rank in all ballots and their average rank in home region ballots, not a near-random bell curve-ish distribution.
Even so, there are enough signs of regional bias creeping into certain elements of the poll that make this worth watching. And one week, as I said, is a really lame sample size. So I do intend to make this an every-week thing. I say "intend to" rather than "will" because I "intend" to do a lot of things that don't happen. But this is the kind of worthy project that I'm pretty good about sticking with.
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