FB: Region 4 fan poll

[Li'l Giant]

I'm curious had NCC beaten Finlandia and Earlham by 50 points instead of playing Wesley and Platteville would they have appeared on the ballots that left them off?

9-1 NCC would have likely been in the tourney (instead of ONU?). Even if they lost that hypothetical first round game (against Franklin perhaps?) my guess is they would be ranked on all final NRFP ballots. Which takes me back to the idea that there is a limit to the number of "quality losses" a team can sustain.

[smedindy]

An 8-2 NCC probably would be in over 8-2 ONU.

[wally_wabash]

jhahn, I'm fine with a voter moving ONU ahead of NCC (though I had NCC 4, ONU 5), but the two voters who completely dropped NCC (after having them at least 6th) are CLEARLY guilty of both lazy and inconsistent voting.  Lazy to automatically rank ANY postseason team higher than any who didn't get in, and inconsistent in that they elevated at least three NON-tourney teams above NCC (the North only had 7 teams in the tourney).

I move that wally withhold those voters' checks!

Thanks, Ypsi.  This is more my point.  Thanks for putting it more eloquently.  I'm also ok with ONU ahead of NCC, but those other 2 don't have a leg to stand on except for the fact that they made the tournament (with weaker schedules than NCC...NCC 8, Albion 18, Franklin 155, ONU 159) and NCC didn't.  When looking at NCC's body of work, there is a plethora evidence to suggest that they would have handled themselves better than Franklin and Albion.  And to rank those teams that finished 8-10 over them?  I'm extremely curious to hear the rationale there.  What's the thought process?  Maybe there is something I'm not seeing?

I'm not one of those that moved NCC out entirely (I was a 6 for the Cardinals), but I think it's hard to pin those ballots down as being lazy.  We're still just kind of taking it on faith that North Central is obviously better than Albion or Franklin (or even DePauw or Wittenberg, frankly).  I know there are common opponent results in play there, but the further those games are from one another, the less you can really draw from them- in a polling sense.  In a regional rankings context, I think you kind of strip that time variable away, but here I think it's ok for somebody to see that IWU beat Franklin in Week 1 and lost to North Central two months later and not think those two results are all that comparable.  The problem here really arises in that North Central's three "best" results are all games that they lost.  That's a really hard thing to deal with (particularly if we're going to overreact to a 56-35 LOSS by Wesley in the quarterfinals...something that I've been shaking my head over for three weeks now, tbh). 

I think the best single sentence in the conversation is this one:

Which takes me back to the idea that there is a limit to the number of "quality losses" a team can sustain.

[Dr. Acula]

In all honesty, the one team that I gave the most consideration to moving up more was JCU.  After the way the playoffs unfolded I was forced to reassess the Streaks a little.  That game was 10-3 at half and JCU had, IMO, the 2nd best defense Mount saw all year behind UWW. 

And for the record, I think I had NCC at 4 in the final poll.  Possibly high, but my logic was I had ONU at 5 and I watched a few of NCC's games and I thought they would beat ONU on a neutral field so I left them ahead of the Bears.

[USee]

Wally,

I am not sure how one can dismiss losses to common opponents by Albion and Franklin early in the season and at the same time count losses by North Central to top 10 teams over that same time period.  Those games happened. It's a lot easier (though imperfect) to use common opponent games to compare NCC to Albion and Franklin than to compare NCC to ONU, Depauw or Witt. Dismissing that data for any reason isn't credible, especially when we don't have enough data to begin with.

Again, ONU, Franklin and Lakeland also had 3 losses.

[USee]

Franklin has exactly zero quality wins on its resume and 3 "quality losses". Better or worse than NCC?

NCC beat a 7-0 and 12th ranked IWU exactly 3 weeks before Franklin lost to ONU at home in the playoffs. Are we going to say IWU at 7-0 was somehow worse than the team that beat Franklin on 9/5 @Franklin? It's not hard to say NCC has at least 1 quality win late in their season and Franklin had none at any point in their season.

[wally_wabash]

NCC beat a 7-0 and 12th ranked IWU exactly 3 weeks before Franklin lost to ONU at home in the playoffs. Are we going to say IWU at 7-0 was somehow worse than the team that beat Franklin on 9/5 @Franklin? It's not hard to say NCC has at least 1 quality win late in their season and Franklin had none at any point in their season.

I think you can absolutely say this.  In fact, I don't think it is disputable to say that the IWU that beat Franklin was not the same IWU that got beat by NCC. 

But I don't want to get too much farther down this rabbit hole.  I only chimed in here to defend those ballots that did not rank North Central as at least reasonable.  I think it's reasonable to look at what North Central did in 2015 and decide that there are 10 better teams in the region.  Most (self included) will disagree, but it's reasonable.  They lost a lot of games.  They didn't win a league.  Their best win came against a team who lost their best player at a point in the game when having the best player on the field still mattered.  There are a lot of ways to digest the 2015 North Central season and the range of spots where you can rank them reasonably is pretty wide. 

[Li'l Giant]

There are a lot of ways to digest the 2015 North Central season and the range of spots where you can rank them reasonably is pretty wide.

Anywhere from 4 to 11 is defensible, in my humble opinion.

[USee]

Wally,

First I want to again recognize you are not the one who didn't rank NCC and you and I probably agree on NCC and their season more than we disagree. So we are really just taking the opposite sides of the argument to flesh out the process we all take.

If you are going to take the position that IWU lost it's best player at a key moment, you have to admit NCC lost it's best player before Wesley and Wheaton games. And they lost their QB before they played IWU and still won the game. That works both ways.

And if your premise is that NCC lost a lot of games it's not consistent to then rank teams ahead of them that lost the same amount of games, nor is it consistent to say an early loss or win by a team (In this case Franklin and IWU) doesn't matter but early losses by NCC do matter. That's not credible.

[wally_wabash]

And if your premise is that NCC lost a lot of games it's not consistent to then rank teams ahead of them that lost the same amount of games, nor is it consistent to say an early loss or win by a team (In this case Franklin and IWU) doesn't matter but early losses by NCC do matter. That's not credible.

I may have been unclear- I don't think that those early games don't count for something.  Certainly they do.  When it comes to common opponents, I think the added value of the common opponent game diminishes as a function of increasing time- to the point where IWU/Franklin in Week 1 and IWU/NCC in Week 9 isn't much more useful in helping me sort out Franklin and NCC in a poll situation than if they didn't have that common opponent.  That's not as clean a comparison as we'd like. 

[Dr. Acula]

There are a lot of ways to digest the 2015 North Central season and the range of spots where you can rank them reasonably is pretty wide.

Anywhere from 4 to 11 is defensible, in my humble opinion.

I wouldn't dispute this.  NCC was hard to rank.  I also thought Franklin was difficult for some of the same reasons. 

[JCUStreaks70]

In all honesty, the one team that I gave the most consideration to moving up more was JCU.  After the way the playoffs unfolded I was forced to reassess the Streaks a little.  That game was 10-3 at half and JCU had, IMO, the 2nd best defense Mount saw all year behind UWW. 

And for the record, I think I had NCC at 4 in the final poll.  Possibly high, but my logic was I had ONU at 5 and I watched a few of NCC's games and I thought they would beat ONU on a neutral field so I left them ahead of the Bears.

+K I think JCU's defense proved to be the best defense in the conference, behind Mount of course, and that the playoffs showed this. I do think JCU could have won at least one game in the playoffs, I understand why they were not taken.

[wally_wabash]

This is happening again this year.  Waiting on a few more ballots which I hope to have in the next day or two so that we can get a preseason poll out early this week for everyone's debating pleasure.  Would also love to get an MIAA regular to round out the group, but so far, no takers. 

[wabndy]

This is happening again this year.  Waiting on a few more ballots which I hope to have in the next day or two so that we can get a preseason poll out early this week for everyone's debating pleasure.  Would also love to get an MIAA regular to round out the group, but so far, no takers.

Wally,
Why don't you just go ahead and project the 32 team playoff bracket off of the pre-season regional polls.  We all know you have a secret burning desire to start bracketology ASAP.

[wally_wabash]

This is happening again this year.  Waiting on a few more ballots which I hope to have in the next day or two so that we can get a preseason poll out early this week for everyone's debating pleasure.  Would also love to get an MIAA regular to round out the group, but so far, no takers.

Wally,
Why don't you just go ahead and project the 32 team playoff bracket off of the pre-season regional polls.  We all know you have a secret burning desire to start bracketology ASAP.

So much fun.  I think Keith does a projection in his Super Sleepers feature in Kickoff, so there's something akin to this out there.