Crunchy football numbers (Soft Pretzel Logic)

Crunchy football numbers

It isn't often that you have two teams in this list playing each other. Of course it happens this coming weekend with Delaware at Villanova and Lafayette with Lehigh, but let's have a look at what happened to Temple and Penn State in Sagarin...

22. Penn State (24) -- road win vs. Temple (130)
37. Rutgers (45) -- road win vs. Army (126)
80. Delaware (75) -- home loss (in five overtimes!) vs. Richmond (70)
101. Villanova (110) -- road win vs. Towson (167)
130. Temple (132) -- home loss vs. Penn State (22)
143. Delaware State (139) -- home win vs. Norfolk State (175)
169. Lehigh (172) -- road win vs. Bucknell (223)
178. Lafayette (189) -- road win vs. Holy Cross (136)
195. Penn (199) -- road loss vs. Harvard (152)
242. La Salle (242) road loss vs. Duquesne (224)

Not many wins on the slate, but Lafayette's stands out the most to me.

And by the way, next week will be the last week for this. Crunchy Numbers for basketball will begin some time next month, when we have enough numbers in the system to actually start making some judgements.

The Top 10 comparison:

Rank	AP	Coaches	BCS	Sagarin
1.	LSU	LSU	LSU	Kansas
2.	Oregon	Oregon	Oregon	LSU
3.	Oklahoma	Oklahoma	Kansas	Oregon
4.	Kansas	Kansas	Oklahoma	Oklahoma
5.	West Virginia	West Virginia	Missouri	Ohio State
6.	Missouri	Missouri	West Virginia	West Virginia
7.	Ohio State	Ohio State	Ohio State	Florida
8.	Georgia	Arizona State	Arizona State	Arizona State
9.	Arizona State	Georgia	Georgia	Missouri
10.	Virginia Tech	Virginia Tech	Virginia Tech	USC

Up until now, I had thought pretty much all year that the computer and human rankings would look the same after a while. It's been such a wild year in college football that it hasn't happened yet. And this week's discrepancies are among the biggest we've seen all year.

So who's right?

Tags:

Posted by Jonathan Tannenwald on November 13, 2007 11:24 AM | Permalink

Comments (1)

Andy:

The fall from Penn this year has
been embarassing and flat out
distressing.

Its hard to swallow knowing that
almost 200 college programs are
better than your team. And i will
even throw out 125 (arbitrary no.)
for the Division I-A teams.

What a tragic decline....

I wonder what other penn alums think!

Posted by Andy | November 13, 2007 1:25 PM

Posted on November 13, 2007 13:25

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Jonathan Tannenwald is a producer with Philly.com.

I fell in love with the Big 5 at first sight upon moving to Philadelphia in 2002. At various points in my journalistic career, I've covered all six of the region's Division I teams. During that time, I've eaten many soft pretzels from the Palestra's concession stands, which is how this blog got its name.

In addition to the blog, I host and produce the Inquirer's College HoopsCast. It's a weekly podcast that features all the latest news and analysis from around local and national college basketball. Regular guests include Inquirer writers Mike Jensen, Joe Juliano and Mel Greenberg.

I also occasionally contribute to the Inquirer's women's basketball weblog, Women's Hoops Guru. If you've come here from there, this blog deals mostly with the men's side of things, though I do write about women's basketball and other sports when they fit in.

When not focusing on college hoops, I host and produce the Inquirer's PhilliesCast with Phillies beat writer Todd Zolecki, and can occasionally be found behind the camera shooting videos of the Eagles, other professional sports teams and the tiger cubs at the zoo.

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on November 13, 2007 11:24 AM.

The previous post in this blog was Penn State-Temple postgame audio.

The next post in this blog is Open thread: St. Joe's at Syracuse.

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Soft Pretzel Logic

A blog about college sports in the Philadelphia region and across the country.