Cyclones Ranked 24th
- Thread starter Remo Gaggi
- Start date
Well, that's your biased opinion. The rest of the nation and all unbiased media disagrees. But whatever. What would all the experts know, over the uneducated opinion of a troll on his rivals' website?
I heard Kirk Ferentz will only dress half the team for the bowl game. The other half will have to dress themselves.
The Iowa Hawkeyes football team is like a possum. They play dead at home and get killed on the road. (hope Connor doesn't tweet back at me for this one)
You know what IOWA stands for?
-Idiots Out Walking Around.
Did you know Donald Trump will send Nate Stanley to Afganistan?
Yeah, he figures he overthrows everybody, why not the Taliban?
The Iowa Hawkeyes football team is like a possum. They play dead at home and get killed on the road. (hope Connor doesn't tweet back at me for this one)
You know what IOWA stands for?
-Idiots Out Walking Around.
Did you know Donald Trump will send Nate Stanley to Afganistan?
Yeah, he figures he overthrows everybody, why not the Taliban?
Q: What is the difference between Brian Ferentz and God?
A: God doesn't think he's Brian Ferentz.
What’s the difference between a litter of puppies and Brian Ferentz?
Puppies stop whining after 8 weeks.
Q. How many Hoks does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. ONE, but it never really gets done. He holds the bulb up and waits for the world to revolve around him.
A: God doesn't think he's Brian Ferentz.
What’s the difference between a litter of puppies and Brian Ferentz?
Puppies stop whining after 8 weeks.
Q. How many Hoks does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. ONE, but it never really gets done. He holds the bulb up and waits for the world to revolve around him.
Well, that’s your biased opinion. The rest of the nation other than the biased AP and CFP voters thinks Iowa is better, along with every unbiased computer ranking and metric. What would all those statistics and metrics know, over the uneducated opinion of a troll on an inferior team’s website?
Guys, as much as I hate agreeing with the Hawkeyes, he has a point on this one.
The CFP rankings are trash. End of sentence.
The AP is only marginally better.
Going through the computer rankings...
TeamRankings
https://www.teamrankings.com/ncf/
#14 Iowa
#38 Iowa State
ESPN FPI
http://www.espn.com/college-football/statistics/teamratings
#14 Iowa
#40 Iowa State
ESPN Team Efficiencies
http://www.espn.com/college-football/statistics/teamratings/_/tab/efficiency
#16 Iowa
#42 Iowa State
CF Analytics
https://www.cfbanalytics.com/ratings
#17 Iowa
#43 Iowa State
Football Outsiders' FEI
https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fei
#20 Iowa
#28 Iowa State
Sagarin
http://sagarin.com/sports/cfsend.htm
#11 Iowa
#42 Iowa State
College Football Reference's Simple Rating System ("SRS")
https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/years/2018-ratings.html
#14 Iowa
#35 Iowa State
* * *
I looked. There is not a computer ranking system that I can find that has Iowa State ahead of Iowa, and none of them are really even particularly close.
We really killed our rankings in the computers with the Drake game. But guess what? That is 1/12 of our sample size this year. We deserved the downgrade.
This, to me, says that we still have work to do to truly eclipse that team to the east.
I think we can do it. But the evidence says we are not quite there yet, either in the more objective computer rankings or from our actual head-to-head this year.
You make zero sense. Media is biased towards the B1G, not the Big12. Media is also biased towards the more historically successful Hawkeyes, not the Cyclones. NOBODY has ever been biased in favor of the Cyclones. Ever.
And still, IN SPITE OF ALL THAT, they think the Clones are the better team. Also, sorry for your lower payout bowl. You can go ahead and hold your dear metrics to sleep at night, since nobody else gave a **** about those and that is all you have.
Besides us, who of note did they beat? I'll hang up and listen.
I already addressed that issue here. We had the better set of wins.
https://cyclonefanatic.com/forum/threads/the-most-undercoached-team.243623/#post-6412017
...but that is not how those computer rankings work.
They use per-play or per-drive efficiencies and/or sometimes margin of victory.
They factor in the quality of your opponent *and* the quality of your play and/or your eventual margin of victory, rather than just W/L binaries.
Doing that more detailed analysis helps them and hurts us.
No way around it.
Yes, but that means that they get credit for better SOS, while at the same time losing to all the teams they faced that were stronger than them. Having a better SOS should only matter if you're actually able to beat those teams. Their losses didn't hurt them as much on the metrics, because most of the times they were competitive all game only to lose by one score on some Nathan Stanley **** up. Not impressed.
Which leads me to the next point, being dominant against teams worse than them (also not impressive). Which I'm sure also boost their metrics.
In the end, that is why the voters look at: who you beat, being able to pull off those close victories (closing the deal), and no bad losses. I'm sure that is all part of the "eye test" and I'm totally okay with that. Metrics will never tell you the whole story.
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Sig, being objective is always a positive in any discussion among human beings, but these are hawk fans, knock it off.
We should look at Iowa's schedule and results from this season.
Simplifying this problem, how about we divide their opponents into "GOOD" and "BAD" below, and just use those qualitative categories...
GOOD = Iowa State, Wisconsin, Penn State, Northwestern
BAD = everybody else
They beat Iowa State by 10, and lost to the others by 11, 6, and 4, respectively. Their worst loss this season on margin was that 11 to Wisconsin, which I think we all remember being a very close football game (Iowa screwed up with boneheaded special teams).
Purdue is somewhere in the middle, but they only lost that game by 2.
Their other wins were by 26, 24, 17, 26, 23, 63 (wow UIUC is terrible), and 3. They did have to pull some late game heroics to beat Nebraska this season. I would say that Purdue and Nebraska were the "best of the rest" above. Iowa managed to play almost exactly as SRS or the other computer rankings said it should have performed every week. They were remarkably consistent, though the level of their consistency was only somewhat above average.
This is the profile of a team that is better than what its record says it is. If you lose close games to good teams and blow out bad ones (in general), then the computer rankings are going to like you. I know we like to ascribe program mystique, coaching acumen, and quarterback play towards pulling close out games, but much of the literature on the same says most everybody wins about 50% of their close games in the long-run. Solid performances against good teams, even if you never quite win, while pounding cupcakes means, if you randomize the end of games slightly going forward, that you maybe could have should have picked off a few good teams, but you always beat the bad ones even if one possession flips or something.
Iowa State, on the other hand, has the profile of a team that probably earned its record and/or maybe was even overachieving a little bit when you look at it. If anything, more than anything else, Iowa State was not a very consistent football team this year.
Look at our schedule...
Iowa was an okay road loss.
Oklahoma was an okay home loss.
We probably should have beaten Akron by more.
TCU was a bad loss.
Oklahoma State was a good win.
West Virginia was an excellent win, one of the best in school history.
Texas Tech was a good-okay home win... looked really good at the time, but Texas Tech's season kind of fell apart and Coach Gosling got fired.
You can always beat Kansas by more.
Baylor was a meh win.
Texas was a getting-kind-of-bad-given-the-score road loss, and especially if you filter out some of our late scores in garbage time.
Kansas State should not have been that close.
The Drake game was a disaster. We should have won that by 40+. I was in "find my happy place" mode much of that game, sucking on my thumb in the corner.
"STFU Sage and stop trying to rationalize this! Drake is not good!"
We had a few very good games, such as WVU and OSU, but we had some absolute clunkers of performances, too, such as Drake and Kansas State. We had a lot of games in the middle where we played slightly above the level of our competition.
Iowa gave you about the same thing every week -- and it was pretty good. Looking back, we were a wildly schizophrenic team with our performances this year.
If Campbell can get them to play like they did against WVU every Saturday, then we are a legitimate Top 10 team and challenging for the conference championship. If we play like we did against Baylor, Kansas State, and Drake, then we will be lucky to make a bowl game next season, with or without Campbell or Heacock or Montgomery or Butler.
I hate all things Jaw(Hawk)eye, but you have to give them credit where it is due.
Our performance this season just does not justify us talking down to them. Yet.
The good news? Their program is stagnate/is what it is. Ours is still rising. The full weight of Campbell and crew's recruiting is still making its way through the system, especially with Brock Purdy and building the offensive line. We will get there.
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Iowa State had one quality win. Iowa had zero/one (depending on how you define “quality win” and whether Iowa State falls into that category). You guys have somehow convinced yourselves that Iowa State beat a murderer’s row of opponents when that’s just simply not the case.
Also, regarding your last point: that is why the computers are smarter than the “eye test”- they are more objective. Statistics show that performance in close games (aka being able to “close the deal”) is largely dependent upon luck. You sound like one of those people who thinks MJ and Kobe were so good because they were “clutch” or had a “killer instinct”- which is complete nonsense.
