I think you have to count this as a wow result-- Duke goes up on Florida 2-0 then Florida comes back to win 3-2 in OT
Count me as surprised. Duke is usually so tenacious on defense. How many were they missing for the U20s?
Florida was missing Adriana Leon. duke was missing Molly Pathman. Does missing a player mean three goals?
Some interesting results in terms of mid-majors v the biggies: Michigan State 0 Cal State Fullerton 1 Providence 0 Quinnipiac 1 St Johns 0 Stony Brook 3 Villanova 1 St Josephs 2 And some similar ones not that surprising: Northwestern 2 Dayton 5 Baylor 1 Long Beach State 2 TCU 0 Stephen F Austin 2 Miami FL 0 UCF 1 With Arkansas v SMU just underway at 0-0 and Boston College v Boston U early in the second half at 1-1. EDIT: BC beat BU 3-1. SMU leads Arkansas going into the second half 1-0. Also St. Louis is playing Marquette and is down 1-0 in the second half. And, in another I missed when I started this post, Auburn 0 UC Irvine 1.
And, SMU finishes with a 4-0 win over Arkansas. St. Louis v Marquette is a washout, literally, stopped due to weather in the second half and recorded as a no-result.
SMU played against Arkansas like they did in the 4-0 exhibition win against Mizzou. Arkansas didn't have a shot on goal until it was already 4-0. It looks like a pretty quick turnaround under Petrucelli so far. It will be interesting to see how well the season goes. The 1-0 2OT loss at SDSU to start the season is starting to not look so bad, and only beating Oral Roberts 2-1 Friday night is a bit misleading considering SMU outshot them 32-6, hit two posts, a crossbar, and had three or four fantastic saves against them - and ORU scored on their only chance of the game late after SMU subbed in a bunch of players after going up 2-0.
Some big conference fans are keen on presenting the midmajors as non-rivals every which way. In the context which you apparently did not read, of good midmajors beating biggies, with little or no surprise at all... cpthomas post was correct. cpthomas does a lot of research, and did not call it an upset, calling it what it was: "interesting result." Due to the geographic rivalries, and due to Miami's recent W over Florida making them capable of much more than their rank, all of these results are indeed interesting, whether or not you call them upsets!
I see the "not surprising" part now. My bad. Everyone's shuffling in the top this past weekend. Sucks to be Duke, though, with that kind of collapse no matter who it was against.
Stanford had 17 shots, ONE was on goal. WVU had seven shots, five were on goal, one went in in the 83rd minute. Nice job, Mountaineers !!
I really get the sense that there is more parity developing throughout the sport. I'd like to credit quality coaching, encouraging parents, true desire by women to play a sport for the love of the sport and school. I am curious to see if those teams with/without their U-20 girls improve when those players return, or if the other teams' time together will overcome the presence of one or two "star" players. With the Exception of Stengel and Stanfords' forward whose name I will not try to spell, aren't 11 united players better than 10 plus 1?
Duke was missing both Pathman and Cobb. Cobb was likely the runner up for Freshman of the Year in ACC last year and one of the league's top attacking players.
Ok, so they were missing 2 attackers. Florida was missing one. Duke scored two. Offense was not the issue. You play with 11. Why did they give up 3 goals?
Let's not get crazy.... Duke was up 2-0 against UF, probably let their guard up a little allowing UF to come back. UF has the talent that you can't afford to do that so early in the match. Then UF got lucky with an own goal off a deflection and the game was tied. UF gained confidence having come from behind and momentum was clearly with them heading into OT. Unlucky for Duke. Good battle from UF. When a team is missing crucial weapons on their attack it allows their opponents to free up other players to push forward and be more aggressive. Less to worry about on the defensive end.
not a mark of a championship team and yet Duke let down? Also not a halmark of a champion. Foot to the neck is more like it. a) you missed a goal. One goal is not worth two. 2) who caused the pressure? Champions deal with pressure. alternatively, Florida was the better team yes, but champions make their luck. Duke scored two goals, they obviously could apply pressure. Maybe the inexperienced players let up -their fault. I'm getting tired of every team missing a player blaming their woes on the u20's. This isn't the first time a team has sent multiple players to the Nats, and in other years, it was during the tournament. UNC sent two players to the Nats in 2008 and did pretty well. Stanford kept their candidates and didn't. This year, UNC has an excuse. They have half their team out. Other teams, especially ones playing other teams that have u20 players, don't have that excuse. They need to get better if they expect a championship.
I'm not. We only had 14 healthy players last Friday. The one that was invited saw fit to decline, and I am grateful for it. Not sure she would learn much from what I saw last night anyway.
It's really hard to tell whether there's more parity apart from anecdotal evidence, which I don't like to rely on. Last year, I tried to see if over the 2007 to 2011 time period, games on average had become closer in score and there wasn't any pattern of change. I also took a look at the goals for and goals against histories for North Carolina, Notre Dame, Portland, and Santa Clara since they had won national titles in relatively recent years (but not Stanford because they hadn't won theirs yet). Looking as far back as I could, depending on how far the schools' on-line archives go back, I found that over time, most of their "goals for" had declined but that their "goals against" had remained relatively stable. This isn't surprising and suggests that as the pool of good players grows and gets stronger and stronger and more sophisticated, it is becoming harder and harder to score. This fits, by the way, with theories of Stephen J Gould about sports as they mature, in Full House (Three Rivers Press 1996) (he writes about why we should not expect to see a 0.400 hitter again in baseball). This doesn't necessarily mean there's increased parity in terms of game outcomes, but rather only that for top teams over their histories, they have won by less in recent years than they did earlier. Perhaps one might expect, however, that as their games become closer, it becomes easier for them to lose games. One thing I just looked at is where the outer edge of the "bubble" has been over the last five years, for NCAA Tournament at large selection purposes. I consider the bubble to be a group of 15 teams. Essentially, given that there are 34 at large selections, I look to see how many of the teams in the top 50 to 55 of the ARPI are automatic qualifiers (conference champions). Let's say that of the top 34 teams, 10 are automatic qualifiers. Then I add 10 to 34 and get team #44 as the last team that would be "in" if the NCAA strictly followed the ARPI for at large selections. But, there may be more automatic qualifiers in the #35 to #44 group, so for each of those I raise the ceiling. Once I've determined that ceiling, it becomes the center of the bubble. I then include the 7 teams with better rankings (that are not automatic qualifiers) and the 7 teams with poorer rankings (that are not automatic qualifiers) on either side of the center and those 14 teams plus the team at the center form the bubble. The more conference champion automatic qualifiers there are in the top 50 to 55 teams, the farther the bubble extends into the rankings. So, the outer edge of the bubble is a good measure of changes in parity, at least among the top 60 or so teams, because it tells how many conference champions are ranked in the top 60. Presumably, the more conference champions in the top 60, the greater the parity. For what it's worth, here are the outer edges of the bubble for the last 5 years (I think I have 2007 and 2008 right, although I'm not certain): 2007: 51 2008: 51 2009: 52 2010: 55 2011: 55
I don't even think that was it in the Stanford-UWV game. It wasn't the absence of Chioma that lost the game for them. I watched the game on the Internet. Stanford outplayed UWV in possession and had more quality chances. But they didn't go in. UWV won with excellent play by their left back, by weathering the storm of Stanford's forays into and near their 18, and by negating Stanford's chances and counter attacking when they could. Like most teams, UWV doesn't have a sophisticated passing attacking but hey, sometimes you get lucky! If the United States can beat Spain 2-0 in the Confederation Cup in 2009, then UWV can beat Stanford in 2012. It's soccer! The best team doesn't always win. Over time, the best teams win the most. But on any given Sunday...
I understand the logic of the #1 team in a conference regular season being top 60 across the board indicating parity among conferences... however if a new conference champion does not win the regular season outright but comes out of nowhere and wins their conference tournament, then there might be more "parity" among teams within that conference, but they are not necessarily a top 60 team and not necessarily on par once they get into the NCAA which is a different level.
I very much enjoy your analysis and facts, but I do wonder whether these numbers could be considered noise rather than a trend. Did the number of total division one teams also increase? What about strength of schedule changes, and winning percentages, getting better or worse, as components of that RPI? And a more telling story could be what was the greatest disparity of RPI wins and goals in various games at high levels, right?
Nail on the head. Thank you. There's a reason the NCAA selection committee looks at an entire season of work rather than just one result or the first few weeks of the season.
Five years' data, on this question, isn't very much. It might mean something or it might not and might "just be noise" as hykos 1045 suggests. However, the numbers in my five year list were based on teams that the ARPI ranked as in the top 60. There were more top 60 teams that were conference champions the last two years than the previous three, for what that's worth, if anything. If a mid-major team that did not win its regular season comes out of nowhere to win their conference tournament, they ordinarily would not be a top 60 team and would not have affected the 5-year list. Again, though, as hykos1045 suggests, this may just be noise.