Marvelous. CSUN beat San Diego 5-0 in San Diego earlier this season. UCLA refused to play CSUN in the regular season after the Matadors beat them at Drake Track Stadium in 2011.
About how I figured it would go down. UCSB did Davis no favors because its other losses weakened UCSB's RPI and made Davis' wins over them less impressive.
That loss was the best thing to happen to UCLA last year. From that match forward, they reeled off 8 consecutive clean-sheets and a trip to the Final Four. Should be a spirited match again this year...as they always are!
Only one team above 41 in the RPI, Davis was hurt by teams like New Mexico and Coastal Carolina losing their conferences auto-bids and taking at-large bids from the bubble teams.
After the CSUN shellacking and a couple of other crash-and-burn performances early in the season, San Diego went on to win eight consecutive conference games. Second time around for CSUN-USD will be a better contest-- don't be too confident of a match between Northridge and UCLA!
According to Massey. ConferenceTmsRecordPctRankSoS Pac 12630-14-60.6611 Atlantic Coast956-21-80.70622 Big East1588-32-150.70734 Big 10742-29-100.5843 Conference USA946-26-120.61955 Big West737-28-80.56266 Colonial1142-32-70.56279 West Coast719-24-60.44987 Now if you want to argue the Big East is the top because of their top teams are the best that is fair. But from top to bottom the Pac12 was the best. They certainly out performed the ACC this year. The Pac 12 using UCLA most two teams from the bottom half of their conference was 2-2-1 in all away games against the 1 4 7 of the ACC.
As someone who is adept at math as you are should recognize that when you have fewer teams it increases the chances of your bottom being closer to the middle whereas if you have more programs, odds are your bottom is further" from the middle. So, for the Pac-12 to be better "top to bottom" than the Big East or ACC or A10 or whatever is misleading because the top 6 teams in the Big East or ACC are, at least, as good as the 6 Pac-12 teams but the Pac-12 doesn't have the bottom pulling them down. Now, you can argue they also don't have the bottom teams to pad their record against, and that's a fair point, too. But the top to bottom argument doesn't hold much water when one conference is 150 percent bigger than the other.
Seems like there's a simpler argument, which is that the only decent rating system puts the Pac-6 at #1.
I get the "representation" arguement.. but not the " our conference is better than yours" part of all this. Akron is the lone, or half the representation of their conference most of the time in the NCAA Tourney, an they are generally successful ... If they were to move to a more competitive conference, what hapens to the Cup then? - It actually is LESS competitive becasue it would have to include the winner of MAC inthe absence of Akron... and perhaps Akron doesnt get there behind a couple schools in the big east, or wherever they might have moved.... The western schools, if the conference is better than most others, should have an edge in the cup as they have faced stiffer competition throughout the season.. not visa versa...So even 1 team in ought to have success...jsut like the MAC conference... What am I missing .. in the end?
The big thing for me is home field advantage. Because western teams are systematically under-seeded, they never get any of the top four seeds, which give a team a huge leg up.
Conspiracy? More like simple homerism. If the system was broken in a way that favored the west, I'm sure there would be western homers defending it. But their arguments would be just as disingenuous as some of the eastern homers around here.
I dont get this.. I ask what I am missing, and there is a humerous post about the conspiracy.. so everyone latchs on to that? I think the fact is.. I'mnot mising anything.. if a West team gets in , and they can play, they should have success... no matter how many teams from their conferenec are represented...
True Like I wrote, if you just want to ignore the weak teams in the conference, the Big East is the best this year or maybe you can say the MAC is the best because Akron is the best team. But if you want to look at the entire conference the Pac12 is the best which is why Massey has that conference at number 1. It is not surprising because if you look at the average number of players drafted per team, the Pac12 and ACC are far ahead of everyone. Even a bottom feeder from that conference like Oregon State has a lot of good players. Welshman will draw a lot of interest this year.
3 factors: 1) Participation - you can't win if they don't let you play. I would better if you asked Gunn, he would tell you he's got better players than than the team at Charlotte he took to the finals last year. Based on the second half of the season, I don't think anyone would look forward to playing them. But even though they should be in the tournament, they are not. 2) Seeding. In order to get into the final both UCLA and Akron (they are not a west team, but as a top team from a bad conference the get screwed every year as well) will have to win a road game to get to the final 4. Neither should have to do so. Last year New Mexico should have been number 1 and they were seeded number 10. The final four is usually on the other end of the country and it is more difficult for you body to adjust to an earlier time zone than a later one. 3) Related to the first - the limited teams in the West are all scheduled against each other so that they all knock each other out until only a couple of west teams remain.
If the RPI calculation used in men's and women's soccer isn't biased against the men's teams in the west do the the distributions as I've explained, why doesn't Massey should the same extreme positive bias for the women's teams in the west? After all, either the worst rating system in general use is flawed (RPI) or Massey is flawed.