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Ranking the Big Ten teams by SOS

k9_r

Offensive Coordinator
Jul 31, 2010
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The numbers in parentheses are the actual SOS and the numbers to the left are their rankings. The final numbers are conference standing.

1. IA (0.569) - 7th Place
2. OSU (0.553) - 3rd
3. PU (0.544) - 12th

4. PSU (0.516) - 11th
5. IL (0.513) - 10th
6. MD (0.508) - 9th

7. MN (0.493) - 13th
8. MSU (0.485) - 8th
9. MI (0.481) - 2nd

10. IN (0.467) - 4th
11. N (0.464) - 1st

12. NW (0.456) - 5th
13. RU (0.455) - 6th

These are, of course, early season numbers and because everyone plays everyone the final SOS will be very close to .500 for everyone. Also I added spacing to group similar SOSs together and created five tiers for easy comparison.

Pretty much as expected, the best conference standings goes to the teams with the weakest opponents. But, a couple things stand out - OSU 3rd in conference is in the top SOS tier. Could they be the best team?

And then there is NW and Rutgers. Maybe their surprising W/L record is simply because they have the weakest schedule in the early going.

Bottom line - standings are going to shuffle, root hard for the Huskers.
 
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This is one of those things that's kind of a victim of itself. Iowa, OSU, Purdue all of high SOS because they've all played us, but since we won the majority of those games, they don't count as a difficult opponent.


That being said, I do think there's some validity to the idea that we've played a soft schedule so far and the real tests come at the end of the season. But hopefully our confidence is through the roof at that point and we play with some swagger.

Maryland will be a halfway decent test tho, they're not terrible and maybe the best team we've played minus tOSU.
 
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Fixed your formatting.
Thank you! That was so weird. I copied and pasted from a spread sheet and all those grid lines showed up. Tried to fix it but it just got worse. No clue what to do about it. Thanks again.
 
Soft schedule, based on how the first third of the season has played out? Yes.

Soft schedule, based on how the B1G coaches and national pundits predicted the conference would play out? Absolutely not.

And the above doesn't include how the schedule was designed. 6 of first 8 weekends on the road while hosting only 4 home series and all 3 pods on the road.

- Michigan hosts 5 series, plus another is 60 miles away.
- Indiana hosts 7 series.
- Illinois hosts 5 or 6 series.
- Ohio State 6 series.
- Iowa hosts 6 series.

While the best facility in the conference hosts 4 series and no pods? Yuk.

I didn't look close enough at other schedules to know for certain but Nebraska doesn’t have back-to-back home series all season while others do. This schedule, as it was to begin the season, wasn't easy. Your overall point of real tests at the end of the season (Indiana, Michigan) is agreeable and I hope you're right on confidence & swagger. It's setting up well for us, but this weekend against Maryland is huge.
 
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Soft schedule, based on how the first third of the season has played out? Yes.

Soft schedule, based on how the B1G coaches and national pundits predicted the conference would play out? Absolutely not.

And the above doesn't include how the schedule was designed. 6 of first 8 weekends on the road while hosting only 4 home series and all 3 pods on the road.

- Michigan hosts 5 series, plus another is 60 miles away.
- Indiana hosts 7 series.
- Illinois hosts 5 or 6 series.
- Ohio State 6 series.
- Iowa hosts 6 series.

While the best facility in the conference hosts 4 series and no pods? Yuk.

I didn't look close enough at other schedules to know for certain but Nebraska doesn’t have back-to-back home series all season while others do. This schedule, as it was to begin the season, wasn't easy. Your overall point of real tests at the end of the season (Indiana, Michigan) is agreeable and I hope you're right on confidence & swagger. It's setting up well for us, but thus weekend against Maryland is huge.
Don't disagree with anything you're saying.

I'm hopeful that it's not it's more the team than the schedule I think Maryland is a real test. Hopefully we beat the piss out of them
 
This is one of those things that's kind of a victim of itself. Iowa, OSU, Purdue all of high SOS because they've all played us, but since we won the majority of those games, they don't count as a difficult opponent.
I think you're lookin at our own SOS and thinking these three teams have hurt our SOS b/c our record is 7-4 collectively with them. But it doesn't quite work like that.

SOS calcs look at your opponent's win % but specifically leave out their games vs you. Those games are removed from your opponent's record for SOS purposes.

What's left is their record in all the other games they've played. The point is to look at how they're doing against the field, not against you.

OSU actually helped our SOS b/c they've won so many games but we've only played them twice making just two entries in our SOS data base. It's those other 16 entries where the problem lies.

Eight of our 18 entries come from Purdue and Minnesota and drag their lousy win % along with them.
 
- Michigan hosts 5 series, plus another is 60 miles away.
- Indiana hosts 7 series.
- Illinois hosts 5 or 6 series.
- Ohio State 6 series.
- Iowa hosts 6 series.
I'm no fan of the Big Ten front office and offer no defense of their scheduling - especially in football which has been very harmful to us. But, Our deal here is not quite as bad as you think.

While we have no home pod we do have five home series not four. We're in a group of seven teams with five home series.

I didn't track B2B home series as I went through the schedules but I did see several and, nope, we're not one of them.

Northwestern actually drew the short straw with only four and, in fact, are playing just their first one this weekend.

Minnesota won the schedule sweepstakes with seven and actually played at home four times in the first five weeks.

Four other teams have six home series.
 
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Maryland isn't gonna be as big of a test as you think because we're that good! We own a number of catagories in the conference and are highly ranked nationally in a few of them and it's not even close. Like I said before, Fk Shitchicken and Indiana absolutely not impressed. In the next 3-5 years or so maybe even sooner, we will start doing what we should've done when we got to the B1G which is own this conference in Baseball year in and year out. I'm very much looking forward to DONU annihilating this conference from top to bottom on an annual basis at will. Oh, it's gonna happen! Laugh it up all you want.
 
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Maryland isn't gonna be as big of a test as you think because we're that good! We own a number of catagories in the conference and are highly ranked nationally in a few of them and it's not even close. Like I said before, Fk Shitchicken and Indiana absolutely not impressed. In the next 3-5 years or so maybe even sooner, we will start doing what we should've done when we got to the B1G which is own this conference in Baseball year in and year out. I'm very much looking forward to DONU annihilating this conference from top to bottom on an annual basis at will. Oh, it's gonna happen! Laugh it up all you want.

I think Maryland will give us a battle much like Illinois. Goal is to take two of three.
 
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I'm no fan of the Big Ten front office and offer no defense of their scheduling - especially in football which has been very harmful to us. But, Our deal here is not quite as bad as you think.

While we have no home pod we do have five home series not four. We're in a group of seven teams with five home series.

I didn't track B2B home series as I went through the schedules but I did see several and, nope, we're not one of them.

Northwestern actually drew the short straw with only four and, in fact, are playing just their first one this weekend.

Minnesota won the schedule sweepstakes with seven and actually played at home four times in the first five weeks.

Four other teams have six home series.
The Minnesota-Northwestern series was actually a home series for the Wildcats that got moved to Minneapolis. I haven’t seen or heard a reason but I suspect it had to do with expecting mid-March weather on the shore of Lake Michigan to be less desirable than the “coziness” of US Bank stadium.
 
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I think it's huge for us that Matthews is really coming on. Without the wind he probably would have had three homers today.
 
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