[CTcard]

Per recent tweet of Phil Steele, I’m not sure this was as much of washout for PAC 12 football many might think:

“There were 31 regular season meetings between Power 5 conference. Ironically the Pac 12 which went 1-8 in bowl games had the best regular season record
Pac 12  6-2
Big Ten  7-5
ACC  8-9
SEC  6-9
Big 12  4-6
@Mike_Yam @YogiRoth”

I was going to refer to this myself but got distracted and hadn't looked up the exact record.

Both bowl games are regular season head to head matchups are a partial measure, at best, of relative conference strength.
The biggest issue is that both make up such a small sampling; Pac 12 teams played 144 regular season games* and the Power 5 out of conference games contributed only 8, or 5%. The Bowl games contribute 7 more Power 5 matchups.
With such small numbers, not only does randomness come into play, but matchups aren't likely to be evened out, and bowl games have extra issues of motivation and how teams handle a month off between games.

As also noted, the Pac 12 has had good bowl records in recent years, a terrible record this year.
They all tell us something, but that something is limited.

I do think that a characteristic of the Pac 12 this year is that its top teams weren't elite and its bottom teams were relatively good (outside of Oregon State). That makes its average fairly good - but most of the time people aren't really thinking about average when they talk about relative strength of conferences.



*I chose to count each conference game as two, as there were two teams involved and each contribute both a win and a loss to the conference record.

[CTcard]

Per recent tweet of Phil Steele, I’m not sure this was as much of washout for PAC 12 football many might think:

“There were 31 regular season meetings between Power 5 conference. Ironically the Pac 12 which went 1-8 in bowl games had the best regular season record
Pac 12  6-2
Big Ten  7-5
ACC  8-9
SEC  6-9
Big 12  4-6
@Mike_Yam @YogiRoth”

I was going to refer to this myself but got distracted and hadn't looked up the exact record.

Both bowl games are regular season head to head matchups are a partial measure, at best, of relative conference strength.
The biggest issue is that both make up such a small sampling; Pac 12 teams played 144 regular season games* and the Power 5 out of conference games contributed only 8, or 5%. The Bowl games contribute 7 more Power 5 matchups.
With such small numbers, not only does randomness come into play, but matchups aren't likely to be evened out, and bowl games have extra issues of motivation and how teams handle a month off between games.

As also noted, the Pac 12 has had good bowl records in recent years, a terrible record this year.
They all tell us something, but that something is limited.

I do think that a characteristic of the Pac 12 this year is that its top teams weren't elite and its bottom teams were relatively good (outside of Oregon State). That makes its average fairly good - but most of the time people aren't really thinking about average when they talk about relative strength of conferences.



*I chose to count each conference game as two, as there were two teams involved and each contribute both a win and a loss to the conference record.