ESPN's Prestige Rankings
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
By now you've all seen ESPN's ranking of college football programs. The rankings are designed to be controversial and attract page views. Something they doubtless succeeded in doing. Several of you emailed to ask what I thought of the rankings. In general I appreciate the methodology applied.
Here's the criteria.
When I look at the resulting teams, I just have one issue, namely, I don't think you can rate programs that high when it comes to prestige if they weren't successful prior to recent history. In other words, I would have enacted a penalty of some sort on programs like Florida State and Miami which I don't believe are justifiably top ten programs.
Put it this way, up until 1978 Florida State was tied for 69th most wins in major college football. 69th! Yes, they were dominant in one decade, but even if that decade was completely dominant (and it wasn't) does it justify ranking them as a top ten program over the 62 year history of the ranking system? I don't think so. Prior to Bobby Bowden Florida State had one bowl win. One.
The fact that Florida State can be ranked so highly is, I think, indicative of a flaw in the system. (And don't think they didn't run a variety of metrics to see what the results would be. You could toy with these and produce a few different outcomes.)
Miami hasn't been as inconsistent as Florida State but from 1946 to 1979, they had two bowl wins. Two! To me, consistency of program success over the decades is more important than a single decade of dominance.
So those are the only two programs that really jump out at me as being drastically overvalued.
I also noted that size of the fan base wasn't really considered. And I've started to wonder whether that might be more key in the long run. I've sort of had this idea in the back of my mind since I went to an Alabama-Auburn game in 2006. An Alabama fan turned to me and said, "Look at all these seats, do you really think we can be bad for that long? We can't afford to."
This was before Nick Saban arrived but even then I thought it was a good point. Namely, if a school has a multi-million dollar program, are they insulated from being bad for a long time because the money at stake insures that sooner or later they'll be good again? Basically that big business dictates they find a winner. Period.
Think about this for a little while. How many stadiums that seat 80k or more fans have truly had awful teams for more than a five or six years in a row. (South Carolina might be the only one. Seriously, think about it. UCLA, although there can be a real debate about how much people care out there and have to get into defining awful.) Here are the 15 largest stadiums in America.
Other than the Redskins, all of them are college stadiums. And every one of these 14 schools that have the biggest stadiums also appear in the top 20 prestige rankings for ESPN.com. So what am I getting at, the top teams really aren't any surprise, they're the schools that the largest crowds go to see play each week. Most interestingly, we've gotten to the point where the teams that are good are going to stay good. It's not just a function of pride and tradition, it's now a function of big money. There's simply too much money at stake to fail consistently. Eventually the right CEO is going to arrive and put things in order.
Yep, welcome to the world of college football, where some programs have simply become too big to fail.
At least we know how well that worked for the banks. Labels: espn prestige rankings claynation top programs too big to fail
Posted by Clay Travis at 3:19 PM
 
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No comment on Vandy being ranked last?
Good point. Tough break for Vandy. I didn't spend much time scanning the bottom of the list.
But I did notice that. And I'd have to say that if you're from a major college conference you can't be the worst program in the history of college football. Just can't.