re: Rice Scouting Report

lol

Stagg8

quote:

---

But this year, Rice would have given LSU fits at the end of the season. I probably would have picked them to win honestly (and I follow LSU football very closely).

---

beardedzeus

quote:

---

Picked them to win? Let's not get carried away. Rice had a good season by their standards but have you seen CUSA's performance in bowl games over the last few years? I believe the conference champ lost to Kentucky this past bowl season. A CUSA team may be able to beat a SEC team in baseball. But football is a MUCH different story. Too much of a talent gap between the 2.

---

I thought I'd chime in and give Stagg8 a little support since it was beginning to look like Custer at Little Big Horn. If you think I'm delusional to think that I can convince the Tiger faithful that Rice could have beat LSU in football at the end of last season you may be right but I believe in miracles. I attended Rice from '77 to '81 and you had to believe in football miracles back then. My first three years we went 4-29 and gave up almost 1300 points. Included in that was a 1977 77-0 loss to LSU that still stands as the second worst loss in Rice history. My senior year we went 5-6 with wins at A&M, TCU and Arkansas and home wins against Houston and LSU (17-7) so I know miracles do happen.

Anyone with a truly open mind about this should put aside their homer hats and look at what some independent observers had to say about college football teams last season. To help you do that I have compiled a list of web sites that you should look at. If you don't want to be open minded you should still be aware of these sites in the future so you can add some stats to your "mine's bigger" shouting match.

Massey College Football Ranking Comparisons This site has 116 different rankings. Any Rice or LSU fan that can't find a ranking to support their personal delusion about their team's greatness or their opponents incompetence just isn't looking hard enough. On this page you'll find LSU at 32 and Rice at 39. If you scroll all the way to the right you'll see that the guys at P-rating are really smart because they say that Rice was the 14th best football team at the end of last year and LSU was only the 40th best team. (See how easy that is.)

Massey Summary of Rankings and BCS rankings This Massey page has the statistical summary of the 116 rankings as well as the BCS rankings. Here you can see that Massey uses the average of the 116 rankings to rank teams. You can also see that LSU rankings range from 14 to 75 and Rice ranges from 14 to 76. Without getting into the boring statistical details, the standard deviation tells you how closely the rankings are clustered around the consensus. You can see that Rice's std dev is among the higher numbers which means that there is a lot less agreement on where Rice ranks. This page also shows that the BCS ranking of LSU is 29 and Rice is 34. Later I'll show how the CUSA and SEC teams stack up based on those BCS rankings.

Waits/Wilson/Huckaby Nutshell Sports Superlist Instead of using 116 rankings this site cherry picks 9 of the best ranking sites and uses them. On this site LSU is 34 and Rice is 37. This site gives a formula for determining the results of a hypothetical game between two teams. According to this site Rice wins at home by 1 point and loses at LSU by 5.

Superlist also says we should us the predictive sites to evaluate our Rice/LSU bowl game would have come out because it looks at the margin of victory and it weights games more recent games more heavily. It suggest we use Jeff Sagarin and Ken Ashby's's Performance Ratings for predicting the outcome.

Jeff Sagarin's ratings Sagarin has LSU ranked 21 and Rice 48 which is a blend of two methods. Sagarin ELO_Chess method says game will lose by 2 at home and 7 and Baton Rouge. The Predictor method says Rice will lose by 7 at Rice and 12 at Baton Rouge. As a Rice homer it's obvious to me that the ELO_Chess method is better.


Ken Ashby's AccuRatings Ashby has Rice ranked 33 and LSU 37. Finally someone knows what they are talking about. Rice and LSU tie at Rice and LSU wins by 8 at home.

Next I pulled the SEC and CUSA teams out and ranked them by their BCS rankings. Here are the results:

Team Conf BCS
Florida SEC 1
Alabama SEC 6
Georgia SEC 11
Mississippi SEC 14
LSU SEC 29
Rice CUSA 34
Vanderbilt SEC 36
Tulsa CUSA 37
South Carolina SEC 43
East Carolina CUSA 47
Kentucky SEC 48
Houston CUSA 50
Arkansas SEC 56
Auburn SEC 61
Tennessee SEC 62
Southern Miss CUSA 70
Mississippi St SEC 74
UTEP CUSA 86
Memphis CUSA 88
Marshall CUSA 92
UCF CUSA 101
UAB CUSA 102
Tulane CUSA 114
SMU CUSA 118

Clearly the SEC is a tougher conference but the BCS standings would have placed Rice 6th in the SEC. If Rice is ranked with the other LSU opponents on last year's schedule we would have been 6th as well. That would also have placed us well ahead of Arkansas at 61 who beat you at the end of last season. Adding to that you gave up 31 points in each of your last 3 games. We averaged 41 points per game last year.

Next let's look at common opponents. We each won both games.

Rice LSU
Tulane 42-17 35-10
N. Texas 77-20 41-3

Total margin of victory Rice 82 LSU 63.

All bluster aside, LSU played a tougher schedule than Rice and your Bowl victory over Georgia Tech was impressive. I think it would have been a close game but like most of our games last year it would have depended largely on which defense came ready to play.

All of this is a side show though the main event kicks off in about 10 hours and we all know that's going to be a dogfight.

very solid team Rice is. LSU better bring the bats early and often. we cant afford to "start hitting" in the 6th inning like we've done lately a few times

looking forward to celebrating another Omaha trip tomorrow at 7pm!!!

not hoping we go 3 games.

but i agree, a 3rd game would have incredible atmosphere

I believe these teams are too evenly matched for this series not to go to a third game. Crazy atmosphere Sunday maybe!