Friday, July 31, 2015

Evaluating the ACC's non-conference schedules

I was contemplating doing a write up about non-conference schedules, and how various teams did in their scheduling, but then Andy Bitter at the Roanoke Times did a much better job than I could.

So I decided to look at last year's schedule.  How do the schedules look after the fact?

Saturday, July 18, 2015

2015 Look-Ahead: Group of Five Contenders

After a pair of posts focusing on Power Conference teams switching in and out of bowl eligibility, I thought I'd show some love to the Group of Five teams.  With a spot in the New Year's Six guaranteed each year (unlike the BCS, which had a conditional spot), the race among the G5 conferences is more interesting than ever!

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

National Champions: How they fared previously

As we go through the rough patches of the offseason, we're starting to see lists of "dark horse" candidates for national champions.  Well, let's take a look at teams from the last 9 seasons and see how the participants of the national championship game fared the season prior.  I set the cutoff at 9, because that's when the BCS expanded to 5 games.  To even it out with the new playoff system, I will also look at the BCS teams ranked #3 and 4 going into the bowls.

If there are wins vacated, I don't acknowledge that, because it doesn't affect this exercise.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Virginia Tech's kick return woes of 2014

With a 6-6 regular season record, there was obviously a lot wrong with Virginia Tech last season.  The high of beating Ohio State in their own stadium is tempered by, well, almost every other game.

One area of weakness that stands out from the season was the poor field position resulting from kick returns.  I decided to take a look at the stats to see if I had been leveling fair criticisms at the kick returners.  I pulled the kickoff data from the game stats from HokieSports.com, which includes a summary of every single play in every single game.

Monday, July 6, 2015

The Mega Conference Realignment of 2010-2015 is finally over

When Nebraska left the Big 12 for the Big Ten in 2010, it started a chain of dominoes that has finally finished falling.

FBSchedules.com has the full list of 2015 conference changes.  Really, the last big move due to the realignment is Navy finally joining a conference (American, formerly the Big East).  The other moves are all also in the Group of 5 realm, and mostly deal with schools that have just made the jump to FBS.

Of course, we've had a scorecard of the complete realignment here.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

2015 Look-Ahead: Heading Back Home (P5 Teams)

Two weeks ago, I took a look back at how in each of the last five years, a handful of teams from the five power conferences became bowl-eligible after failing to do so the previous year. This time around, I'm going to look at things from the other approach: teams missing out on bowl eligibilty despite making it to that mark the previous year.