Massey Ratings have ISU going 4-8
- Thread starter Bardman
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Florida St. is struggling, but it's still noteworthy that ULM took them to overtime. I can see the game being closer than comfortable like Akron last year. Then more people overreact, then the offense figures out how to finish drives and wins ensue.
After rewatching the Iowa game I am feeling pretty confident. Iowa is not a great team, but they are great at doing what essentially ISU wants to do as a general philosophy, albeit with a different look. Be sound, be physical. I think it is going to play out well in the Big 12. I'm not going to freak out if ISU gets beat by Iowa despite trying to do what Iowa has been doing for 20 years and making lots of mistakes along the way. Baylor and Texas are fine playing that physical style, but I it gives the rest of the league fits, even OU.
After rewatching the Iowa game I am feeling pretty confident. Iowa is not a great team, but they are great at doing what essentially ISU wants to do as a general philosophy, albeit with a different look. Be sound, be physical. I think it is going to play out well in the Big 12. I'm not going to freak out if ISU gets beat by Iowa despite trying to do what Iowa has been doing for 20 years and making lots of mistakes along the way. Baylor and Texas are fine playing that physical style, but I it gives the rest of the league fits, even OU.
This is really how it goes basically every season
Preseason - Big 10 is great, Big 12 sucks
Non-con: I guess we were wrong, Big 10 is bad, Big 12 is very good
Conference season: Looks like the Big 10 is actually good. Because Big10 team X beat Big10 team Y, it's clear that the team and conference as a whole has really improved as the season has gone along. Now that we see Big12 team X get beat by Big12 team Y it's clear the Big12 was overrated and the conference is getting worse as the season has gone along.
Bowl season: Guess it turns out the Big10 wasn't very good and the Big12 is good. But you don't want to read too much into bowl games, and I think we'll see the Big10 take a big step forward next year.
I'm guessing this is just going off data? 2 games is a small sample size
Basically. Same things happens to the RPI in basketball early in the year.
LOL some fancy internet machine is predicting us at 4-8 and we aren't even into Brocktober yet...
Unfortunate to see that people still pay any mind to Massey's ratings.
Just like Kenpom early in the season... When there aren't enough data points things can really skew. Iowa State has played in 2 low scoring games against 2 good defenses so I'm not surprised Massey is taking a dump on Iowa State.
6-6 with this roster being healthier would be way more disappointing than the 2012 team.
We'll see though...if the penalties and fundamentals of the game don't improve it's not impossible. There's teams every year that have plenty of talent that don't put it together.
I think my most disappointing season was 2005.
The defense was an absolute mauler, but the offense and special teams were sniffing glue. Meyer and Blythe were "the ones" to lead us to the promised land, but they never really improved. We lost so many close, grind-it-out games because the offense never seemed to make one more play to keep the ball or score one more time, or the defense just whiffed on a play (e.g., a big sack or interception) that would have put somebody away for good.
The same sort of "good defense, iffy everything else" thing showed up in 2012, but I am already feeling a few shades of 2005 with an outstanding defense letdown elsewhere.
The dude obviously gives no credit to our defense. He has them giving up a ton of points. That won't happen. On the other hand he is giving way too much credit to our offense which is a stumbling mess right now. If the offense fixes the mistakes it has been making for the past six games we will be just fine. Are there any gimmes out there? Zero. Even KU has shown they can rise up and bite you.
If only there was some anecdotal evidence of Campbell team starting slow and finishing strong...
Those projections usually account for points differential and/or per play net efficiencies, not just simple W-L records. Crushing Alabama by 30 like Clemson on a neutral field earlier this calendar year is more impressive than squeaking by them by 1 at home when it was raining, somebody was hurt, and other weird stuff happened with the game.
Those "quality of play" not just W-L statistics pick up on that better. Winning a close game versus losing a close one should not radically alter the forecast. We needed a very small amount of points or net yards per play to beat Iowa, so our projections would not change much.
The countervailing effect, however, is the college football season is so short. One game is 8.3% of your total sample size of 12. The Drake game last year, for instance, absolutely killed us in the advanced metric statistics once the season was over. So you have to make pretty radical revisions pretty quickly because only limited data comes in because N=12.
This is not like the NBA where if, for instance, LA was to lose to a bad team like the NYKs one night. The season is 82 games long. Unless LeBron and AD struggle in the long-term, one game like that is kind of meaningless. One college football game is the equivalent to 6.8 NBA games or 13.5 MLB games, so you have to put more into each of them.
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I'm sure when we were 1-3 last year, the same projections had us ending at 3-9 or 2-10. Good thing we still have to play the games.
Let's not forget that over the last couple of years we had some very close games that happened to fall in our favor so someone predicting us to finally not win those games isn't really that surprising. (2018 - OSU, Tech, KSU, and Ughh... Drake. 2017 - OU, TCU, and Memphis) We could have very well lost any of those games on just a play or two... thankfully we did not.
