Good morning loyal readers and comrades and welcome to your Wednesday Skull Session.
It seems like Tuesday is the day when the only things people write about are polls and rankings, so I'm afraid that's what you'll be having with your morning orange mocha frappuccino.
But who cares? It's football. We spend 8 months of the year only talking about it, and now we have real, live football to watch.
If people want to write articles upon articles explaining their polls, then that's fine by me, because I get to watch football at least 3/7 days this week.
From the AP Poll (2012 AP Champions all the way!) and the USA Today Coaches Poll, one of the more interesting stories was Bob Amussen's ballot - the guy who had Michigan at number one in the preseason.
Amussen still thinks highly of Michigan, voting them 13th in the country while rating Ohio State at 20th, lower than their actual rating at 14th (which is up from 18th).
None of this stuff matters yet, of course, because real honest-to-goodness football hasn't been played yet.
Only 3 AP voters left Ohio State out of the top 25 (and Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples only left them off by accident). One of the others, Josh Kendall, had this to say:
@landgrant33 No, no accident, just want to see a little more. Nothing personal, I promise.
— Josh Kendall (@JoshatTheState) September 4, 2012
For a statistical ranking, I suggest Sagarin's computer rankings, which have the Buckeyes at 9th on the "predictor" scale and 19th with the ELO_Chess rating.
#BRAXTON4HEISMAN. Though Meyer is still all "Oh gosh!" to hear Braxton and Heisman in the same sentence, Bill Connelly is all "awww yeahhhh", ranking Braxton at 4th (and receiving 7/10 points in his race) out of the Heisman contenders:
Yes, the passing still needs work. Miller completed just 14 of 24 passes for 207 yards and two touchdowns (for one of the two, the receiver did most of the work) and, including two sacks, averaged a healthy-but-not-Heisman 7.3 yards per pass attempt. But oh, those legs. You only have to be proficient, and not spectacular, through the air when you can rip off 177 rushing yards in 15 carries and add an absolutely gorgeous 65-yard touchdown run. He could be quite the muse for Urban Meyer.
I expect Braxton's number to increase slowly but surely through the air, but not really reach Heisman-like numbers this year. Honestly both of those predictions are pretty safe bets and would surprise no one.
What would surprise me, however, is whether Le'Veon Bell can continue to carry the ball 44 times per game. Running backs wear out extremely quickly - faster than many other positions on the field - and the MSU offense needs more than just him now that Kirk Cousins is gone.
But after Ball's shaky first game of the season, could it be that Bell carries the B1G Heisman hopes this year? With only a single letter separating the two backs, I don't see why not.
BUCKEYES IMPRESS THE STATS MAJORS. Chase Stuart, continuing his series from Smart Football, analyzed the first week's upsets and impressive wins (based upon a modified version of the Simple Rating System), and the Buckeyes headlined the "Impressive Wins by Favorites" category.
Here's how he did it:
The SRS thrives on interconnectivity — we need each of the teams to play each of the other teams as many times as possible. You can’t create a predictive version of the SRS until after several weeks of results: an objective strength of schedule can’t be created until the system seems how teams perform against multiple teams.
But we can see how teams performed in week 1 compared to expectations, by comparing the actual results to what the SRS would have predicted if the same teams had instead met at the end of the 2011 regular season.
The Buckeyes, who underperformed last season due to a multitude of reasons, performed far better than they were expected, at least based upon the SRS: "Urban Meyer's debut was about as good as he could have hoped, thumping a Miami of Ohio team that was solid in 2011."
While Stuart notes that the most impressive team subjectively was Alabama in the win over Michigan, the stats rate the Bama win as only the sixth most impressive win by a favorite.
Also impressive in the B1G was Nebraska's win over Southern Miss (I pray that Taylor Martinez never ever passes like that again) and Illinois over Western Michigan.
Ominously, UCF ranked fourth most impressive in their blowout win over Akron.
Braxton flying to the top of Heisman rankingsSABAN-WORSHIPPERS. One recent trend in college football has been teams reverting from spread to run offenses to more traditional pro-style sets (see: Auburn, Florida) in an attempt to follow Saban's gameplan, or "Process" that has been so successful during his tenure at Alabama.
The excellent Bryan Fischer at CBS Sports wrote about this "Process" in a recent column, and Fischer believes that Saban's grand strategy is founded upon recruiting the most elite athletes for certain roles on his team:
At Alabama, Saban has created roles for every single position in the offense and on defense, and simply goes about finding the right players to fit each one. He made it a point to say Saturday night that the staff doesn't pigeonhole anybody but from the quarterback (not especially tall or short, plays mistake free) to slot receiver (fast), flanker (tall, strong, fast) to defensive tackle (mammoth) and on down the line, it's about players fitting a system that has proven itself time after time. Why have the Crimson Tide become so dominant as of late? Their head coach is not only getting the right players to fit each role, but he's been bringing in the top athletes in the country to fill each spot. As I wrote after the game, there's nobody better at replacing and reloading than Saban.
While Urban uses a tactically different offense, the strategy is largely similar: recruit the most elite athletes in the country to fill a certain, specific system and give them the best training, thereby reloading each year.
Eerily similar, in fact:
The formula is real simple. Go recruit some really good players that know how to compete, are tough, go surround them with the best coaches in the country, you usually find a way to win a few games. That's the formula we're going to use here, and we're going to go really, really hard.
I'm sure every coach in America would have that same strategy (elite recruiting + elite coaching = winning), but both Saban and Meyer seem to actually do just that each year.
STEELE-ING SOME LOVE. Apart from his prediction about Houston last week (and who could have seen that coming?), Phil Steele and his computer got a lot right about last Saturday's matchups.
He even got within two points of correctly predicting Oklahoma State's bombardment of Savannah State, 84-0, on Saturday. For your Buckeyes, Jeff Svoboda noticed that Steele correctly predicted that the Buckeyes would hold Miami to -1 rushing yards.
The Buckeyes also received praise as the sixth most impressive win according to his statistics, falling behind only Alabama, Florida State, Nebraska, Oklahoma State, and Baylor.
Look for Steele's week 2 preview and predictions to likely be released on his daily blog later today.
LINK ME, BRO. The return of Spike Factor... First step for Jurassic Park... For the archaeologists out there... The Alphabetical... Potty mouths must apologize to their mothers... Not sold just yet on Tennessee (though they performed better than I expected), but agree about UF and Oklahoma... Reddit weighs in on potential upsets... More than good, they're great? Probably not.
