After this year's bowl games, the narrative that developed among the sports media was the Big Ten, after what seemed like a historically strong regular season, proved to be weak after a terrible bowl performance. But how bad was that bowl performance? To find out, I compared the actual performance of the conferences to a set of 10,000 simulations of this year's bowl games, excluding this Monday's National Championship Game. To create the simulations, I used log5 and Pythagorean expectations, as I did previously for the NFL and MLB . However, because of the variability in strength of schedule in college football, using actual points scored for the Pythagorean expectations would be inaccurate. Instead, I'm using the Football Outsider's S&P+ ratings of offense and defense (referenced on 1/4/2017), which adjust for strength of schedule and account for efficiency as well as performance. To rate the performance of each conference, I found the percentile of t...
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