So far, here are the best conferences: *using the rankings from TDS (Top 30 teams) http://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer-national-rankings/women 1.) ACC: FSU (2), Virginia (3), Duke (5), UNC (7), BC (13), Clemson (14), V-Tech (17), Notre Dame (25) 2.) Pac 12: Stanford (1), Cal (10), UCLA (11), USC (16), Arizona (23) 3.) Big Ten: Ohio State (9), Minnesota (12), Penn State (19), Rutgers (20), Northwestern (26) 4.) SEC: Florida (6), Texas A&M (18), South Carolina (22), Auburn (28), Arkansas (30) 5.) American Athletic: UCONN (8), South Florida (21) 6.) Big 12: West Virginia (4) 7.) WCC: BYU (15) 8.) Big East: Georgetown (25) 9.) Ivy League: Princeton (27) 10.) Atlantic 10: George Washington (29) Most disappointing conference (tie) Big 12 (West Virginia, no one else is ranked) WCC (just BYU. the demise of Portland and Santa Clara continues) Most disappointing teams Notre Dame, Baylor, Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Marquette, Portland, Santa Clara, Wisconsin Most improved conference Pac 12 (thanks to UCLA) Most improved teams UCLA, Arkansas, Ohio State, Minnesota Best team right now Stanford Most talented team in pro/international prospects (tie) Duke (Racioppi, Payne, Gibbons, Quinn, etc) Stanford (Sullivan, Amack, Bauer, Campbell, etc) Better than their ranking (tie) BYU (15) Penn State (19)
TDS is not a good source. Try this: PacTwelve 1 ACC 2 BigTwelve 3 SEC 4 American 5 BigTen 6 Ivy 7 WestCoast 8 BigEast 9 Colonial 10 BigWest 11 ConferenceUSA 12 MidAmerican 13 SunBelt 14 AtlanticTen 15 MountainWest 16 Patriot 17 Southern 18 AmericaEast 19 BigSouth 20 OhioValley 21 MissouriValley 22 BigSky 23 MetroAtlantic 24 AtlanticSun 25 Southland 26 WAC 27 Horizon 28 Summit 29 Northeast 30 Southwestern 31
Like I said during my 2015 NCAA Tournament Prognosticator Acceptance Speech, "I recommend that all listening watch more film to improve your game. Don’t worry about statistics as they can always be made up like I do at my job. Why, because anyone can interpret and use them the way they feel useful." Therefore, PAC12 better than the ACC, Hogwash. American better than the Biggy10, Brainwash! Let the video roll....
I like this. To be clear, since my simulations appear to be irritating some people, all I've done is create a system, which I've described in detail, and report the results. No interpretation whatsoever. What's sort of interesting, to me, is how the simulation appears to show some implications of scheduling and conference teams' reliability or lack of reliability. The average ARPI of each conference's teams, in the simulation, matches the average over the last two years. Thus the starting ranks of the conferences, in average ARPIs, is consistent with the last two years. (I would like to have used more years, but conference realignments would have caused problems.) Since the conference strengths based on which I assigned ARPIs to teams were consistent with the last two years, what the simulation results are showing, for conferences, is the effect of how teams within the conference have scheduled their games this year and, very likely, what would happen if the different conferences were equally reliable in their performances. I'm thinking, however, that the conferences aren't equally reliable in performance. Looking specifically at the Big 10 and American conferences, the Big 10 was #5 in 2014 and #2 in 2015. The American was #6 in 2014 and #5 in 2015. That's according to the ARPI. So, the simulation has the Big 10 with a higher average ARPI, for purposes of simulating game results, than the American. Then why the difference at the end of the simulated season? Scheduling and, most likely, reliability. I'm guessing that the American will suffer significantly more upsets and will achieve fewer positive upsets than the Big 10. Thus its ranking relative to the Big 10 will decline as actual results come in. On the other hand, who knows? We'll see at the end of the season. Regarding the ACC and the Pac 12, the ACC had a poor year, by its standards, in 2014. That's affecting the simulation since I used 2014 and 2015 as my base years for assigning ARPIs to teams.
Even I enjoy the prognostications especially since they're not opinion-based. And they're even not biased towards Portland and their poor beleaguered coach. Keep up the nice work, cpthomas. (Too bad he can't read this since he blocks me, HA!)
As a matter of interest, Kenneth Massey's ratings, which are among the best for DI Women's Soccer (my work says they are the best, particularly at rating the conferences' teams correctly in relation to each other) has the top 15 conferences as follows: 1. Pac 12 2. ACC 3. Big 10 4. SEC 5. Big 12 6. West Coast 7. Big West 8. American 9. Big East 10. Mountain West 11. Colonial 12. Ivy 13. Atlantic 10 14. CUSA 15. Mid American
But Pac-12 has 12 teams and ACC has 14. Aren't Pitt and Syracuse dragging the ACC's rating down? The ACC's top 12 teams would put it above the Pac-12. Or does he account for this somehow? Also interesting to see the teams in the Pac-12 have a relatively consistent decrease in strength from top to bottom whereas in the ACC there's a sharp drop off after Wake Forest.
As I understand it, the conference rating includes all the teams in the conference. Think of it as nwsl average attendance where you actually have to include the top three attendance teams as well as Sky blue.
True, duh. It's averaged across all teams in each conference so therefore number of teams doesn't matter. Had a brainfart.
The other interesting thing is that the ACC teams don't all play each other each season. They rotate. Each team only gets 10 ACC games. I forget exactly how it works.