competition is good

The more you look at college football this year, the more you realize things are very competitive. I like that, although the SEC prognosticators are of course a little slow to catch on. There are certainly some individual players and teams that have separated themselves. If you took the top ten or so teams and did home and away matchups against anybody else, they'd probably win about 17 of the 20 games.

But increasingly so, the next grouping of teams keeps getting larger. So to backup my angst when I hear some ex-Georgia or Florida commentator talking about how obviously the SEC is the best conference in the country, I thought I'd break down exactly what that means. And the result is that you just can't reach any such conclusions. The conferences aren't meant to play each other; the vast majority of games played are within the conference, so there are few data points to consider. There's also the debate about how much you look at what has actually happened during the season, and how much you predict what will happen in the future. And finally, how much weight do you give to playing good opponents, and how much goes to not losing? What's better, going 4-2, or going 6-4? Is it better for a conference to be relatively even, or for there to be a large difference between its top teams and the bottom ones?

So I looked at matchups that have happened so far among the six major conferences plus the Mountain West, Notre Dame, ECU, Boise State, and Fresno State. Does anything stand out?

For one thing, there just aren't that many marquee matchups. I count only four 'big' games through four weeks: Missouri-Illinois, USC-Ohio State, Alabama-Clemson, and Kansas-South Florida. That's simply not enough information to make conclusions about conferences as a whole, although it is interesting that each of the six BCS conferences is represented in these pairings at least once. Georgia-ASU could have been big, but the non-USC Pac 10 is just terrible, and I'm willing to go back and make Wisconsin-Fresno State a big game at the end of the season if Fresno State wins out, but I'm not sold on that happening.

Another way to look at it is the total number of games played against each other. That's a little misleading since there are different numbers of teams in the conferences. But you know what's really interesting here? The SEC, with 12 teams, has played by far the fewest games against fellow BCS+ folks, even less than the much-maligned Big East which only has eight teams. Now, it should be pointed out that the SEC begins conference play earlier than others, so there has been less opportunity to play non-conference foes. But it really jumps out at you when you analyze it. The SEC just doesn't play much non-conference competition; they're the only one of these seven conferences to have played fewer than 10 teams from the other six conferences.

So having said that, here are my conference power rankings followed by my individual team rankings.

1) Big 12
Marquee wins: Illinois, West Virginia
2) SEC
Marquee wins: Clemson
3) Big 10
Marquee wins: none
4) ACC
Marquee wins: none
5) Big East
Marquee wins: Kansas
6) Mountain West
Marquee wins: none
7) Pac 10
Marquee wins: Ohio State

1) USC
2) Oklahoma
3) Georgia
4) Missouri
5) Florida
6) Texas
7) Alabama
8) Wisconsin
9) LSU
10) South Florida
11) Texas Tech
12) Penn State
13) BYU
14 Utah
15) Wake Forest
16) Illinois
17) Ohio State
18) Kansas
19) Auburn
20) Oregon
21) East Carolina
22) Virginia Tech
23) Clemson
24) Connecticut
25) Oklahoma State