(09-07-2016, 08:24 AM)Treebound link Wrote:24? Talk about an outlier. Clearly Mr Nebraska has a Stanford issue.Â
I have to laugh at Jon "Clickbait" Wilner. He has us with the second lowest ranking at #13. :P
McKewon actually had Stanford ranked #4 before the Oregon game last year, so it's not entirely a Stanford-hating thing. (Nor is it a Pac-12 thing, as he ranks Washington at #5, higher than anyone else does. He has UCLA at #18, higher than anybody except for Wilner. He has Colorado at #25, which is CU's only point in the AP poll.) I wonder whether he just thought we lost too much and didn't expect us to be very good this year, and it'll take us beating SC, UCLA, etc. before he shifts his perceptions. I'll keep an eye on his rankings, and if we don't vault to the top 10 on his list if we're 3-0 after Week 4, then I'll be more perplexed. If we beat a top 5 team (in his eyes) on the road, then I'd expect we'd be right up at the very top.Â
And I'll agree with North Woods on Wilner's AP rankings. Yes, he's often far off what the rest of the pollsters have, but he defends his rankings and explains each controversial spot, generally being very results-based rather than sticking to his preseason perception of how good he thinks a team is. Texas at #2 is a surprise, but he still thinks ND is very good, and thus thinks that Texas beating them was very impressive (and since he thinks ND is good, he's not going to put them way down the rankings for losing on the road in 2OT to an apparently much-improved Texas team). He thought A&M beating UCLA was impressive because he thinks UCLA is pretty good, so he put both A&M and UCLA higher than everybody else. He didn't think Ohio State beating up on Bowling Green or Michigan beating up on a road-weary Hawaii team was very impressive, so he has them lower than other pollsters. He remembers Iowa being terrible in the Rose Bowl, and beating Miami of Ohio isn't enough to really make him believe they're suddenly good. Michigan State struggling to beat a FCS team at home isn't impressive, so he has them lower than other pollsters. He thought Wisconsin beating LSU was impressive, so he has Wisconsin higher than most (though most pollsters went with him on that one, as Wisconsin vaulted from unranked to #10).Â
As for his Stanford ranking, he said in his article explaining his ballot (
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/collegespor...-ballot-6/) that he had Stanford in a bucket with Michigan, Ohio State, Washington, and TCU--all teams that he expects to be very good but which didn't record "substantive results" and the differentiation between them is essentially meaningless at this point. We can quibble about him putting Kansas State on a level with Hawaii, Bowling Green, Rutgers, and South Dakota State, but it's fair to say that Stanford didn't blow us all away last Friday.Â
In other words, he tends to discount preseason expectations more than other pollsters and values quality results above all. I'll often disagree with his rankings, but I appreciate that he explains them and tends to stick to his methodology (though there are always exceptions). The more voters have to explain their ballots and why they think certain teams are better than others, the richer the discussion.Â
And yeah, his ballot tends to converge with others as more results come in, but his methodology can still be pretty contrarian. In the final AP poll before the playoff last year, he had Clemson ranked #4, and his reasoning was that Clemson didn't have the resume of quality wins that Alabama, Michigan State, and Oklahoma had at that point. His only outlier team in the top 15 of that poll was Oregon (ranked #15; he had them at #9). (There was noise at the bottom of the poll, but that's where you tend to see more divergence anyway.)Â
