PERCEPTION VS REALITY: CONFERENCE STRENGTH IN RANKINGS

The first Bowl Championship Series standings of the season will be released on Monday, combining the Harris Poll, Coaches Poll and six other computer rankings in a magical algorithm that will eventually dictate which two teams can play for the national title.

Although it has tried to run from its subjective and sometimes biased past, college football, like an ill-fated hero in a Greek tragedy, seems destined to be destroyed by that which it works to avoid...the polls. Each year it seems a new controversy rises up, forcing the system to be re-evaluated and tweaked in the hopes that it will be the last such issue. It never is.

The polls, both loved and hated by fans, generate as much discussion as the games themselves and there is much talk swirling around the anticipated release of the first BCS standings. With a full slate of games still waiting to be played this weekend, any consideration of what those initial rankings might look like is certainly premature. Already tonight, BYU, the ninth-ranked team in the nation, was bitten by the upset bug, falling to TCU in Fort Worth, Tx, and likely saw its BCS bubble burst.

Still, Penn State fans can't help but be excited to see where the team will rank on Monday. Forecasters are predicting that the Lions will be in the #3 slot, right behind Texas and Alabama, should all three of those teams win on Saturday. If that holds true, it would be the highest ranking ever for Penn State in an initial BCS ranking - but keep in mind the difference between #2 and #3 is much greater than one. In the BCS, #2 is the absolute cutoff.

More than just battling its remaining schedule, Penn State also finds itself in the position of carrying the flag for the Big Ten this season and battling the perceived weakness of the conference. When the year started, the AP Poll featured four Big Ten teams, the Coaches Poll had five. Ohio State, Wisconsin and Illinois were all slotted ahead of the Lions in the preseason - all three (plus Michigan in the coaches poll) are now either unranked or listed behind Penn State, one of just three conference teams still ranked.

That number does not compare favorably to conferences like the Big XII, which occupies five of the top eleven spots in the AP Poll, or the SEC, which claims four of the top 13 teams; however, the Big Ten has more ranked teams than the Pac-10 or Big East and has the same number, although a higher average rank (11.16 vs. 15.3), than the ACC. Still, most fans, and even some pollsters, might argue that the Big Ten is the weakest of the BCS conferences. That argument has little relevance until it becomes a strong enough perception that it can influence the human voters in the AP, Coaches and Harris Polls. But has that happened?

Since the BCS does not put out a poll after the bowl games are played, any comparison of conference strength by rankings must be done by using the final AP Polls of recent years. Also, since the Big Ten and SEC have matched up in the last two national championship games, we'll limit our comparison to those two conferences.

Consider that the average overall records of the Big Ten's eleven teams and the SEC's twelve teams from 1997-2007 are almost identical. SEC teams have won 58.1% of their games while the Big Ten's teams have won 56.5%. From that number we can deduce that one conference has not been significantly more competitive than the other and that each should have been equally represented in the AP Polls (after all, what other factor, besides wins and losses can dictate your rank?). However, that is not the case.

Here's a representation that shows how each major conference has fared this decade in the final AP Top 10 poll.

The SEC had nearly half a team more than the Big Ten did in each year's final top ten. Even if you consider that these polls reflect the results of bowl games, the SEC has only won three more BCS games than the Big Ten has in the last ten years, which leads you to believe that this is certainly a sign that the SEC is more respected by the voters than the Big Ten is.

You could attribute this to a number of factors, some valid and some not. The fact remains that the perception is out there that the SEC is becoming the nation's best conference while the Big Ten is regressing. To quote Mike Gundy, "That's not true!" The SEC has the same amount of national championships this decade as both the Pac 10 and the Big XII and only one more than the Big Ten. It has been selected to fewer BCS games than the Big Ten since 1998 and, as you can see from the graph below, its representation in the top 10 at season's end is actually on the decline.


All this does little to settle the argument about which conference is the best, or most deserving of the voters' respect when they submit their ballots each Saturday, but it does serve to remind them to keep an open mind and not be influenced by perceptions that are driven mostly by vocal fan bases and a few talking heads on television.