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New Conference ISR's

I made a change this morning (what, you didn't notice?) in the way that I'm calculating conference ISR's, and the difference is worth some commentary. As I've mentioned before, I've been dissatisfied with the way I was doing them almost from the beginning, but inertia's a powerful tool, so it took some recent discussions with the ever-useful Paul Kislanko to get me to move on it.

Historically, what I've done is to go through the game list (OK, have the computer do it, but you know what I mean) and translate each game into a conference-versus-conference matchup -- for example, Texas at TCU (not that that would ever happen) would get translated into Big 12 at Mountain West -- and then that set of scores would get run through the ISR algorithm. The problem with that is that the Big 12 doesn't play the Mountain West; Texas plays TCU. In that case, where each is the best that the league has to offer, it doesn't matter much, but what about Florida State-Appalachian State most years, for example?

Instead, what I'm now doing is to run through the ISR algorithm for teams as usual and then add one more step at the end -- for each conference, take the average ISR adjusted for home field and winning or losing (the usual ISR adjustment made on each step through) for all games played. Note that this means that conference games are included -- one of the defenses offered by proponents of the Southeastern power conferences is that they can play weak non-conference schedules because their conference schedule is so overwhelming that they can play weak competition outside and still have a killer schedule. Including conference games lets that factor be included in the analysis.

                 New       Old
Conf           ISR  SoS  ISR  SoS

Big 12           1  21     3  17
Pac 10           2   4     2   4
SEC              3   5     1  19
Big West         4   1     6   1
ACC              5   7     4  30
WCC              6   3     8   5
C-USA            7  10     5  10
MVC              8  17     7  15
Big Ten          9  31     9   9
Sun Belt        10   6    10  18
WAC             11   2    11   8
Mountain West   12  12    15   3
Big South       13   8    16  25
Southland       14  13    17  21
Atlantic Sun    15   9    14  22
Southern        16  14    13  28
Big East        17  28    12  27
MAC             18  25    18   6
CAA             19  18    19  23
OVC             20  15    21  16
Patriot         21  27    20  29
Atlantic 10     22  26    23  13
Independents    23  19    24  11
Mid-Continent   24  16    25   7
Horizon         25  11    22   2
America East    26  23    28  24
Ivy             27  29    26  12
NEC             28  30    27  31
MAAC            29  24    29  14
MEAC            30  22    30  26
SWAC            31  20    31  20

Now, the old SoS rankings were almost meaningless, so don't get too hung up on the changes there. The biggest changes here are the dropping of the SEC and ACC. If you actually look at the ISR's rather than just the ordinal rankings as I'm using here, you'll see that the ACC actually dropped by more; the SEC is at the tail end of a tightly-grouped top three now instead of just ahead and didn't actually change much.

The reason for this is that an old charge turns out to be true. It's not just that the ACC and SEC feast on the mid-major and lower conferences; it's that, by and large, they're feasting on the slim pickings at the bottom of those conferences, and that shows up here.

Grabbing an example off the shelf, the Southern Conference is a reasonable place to look for mid-week competition for the SEC. They're in the middle of the pack, might get two bids (didn't last week, did this week, might not next week), and they're geographically convenient. And there have been 16 SEC-Southern games played. Only one of those, though, has involved College of Charleston, the one tournament lock in the league, and none have involved Western Carolina, the second-best team. On the other hand, the league's worst team, Furman, has played five games against SEC teams. Not all the cases are that stark, but the overall trend is there.

Now, as a larger percentage of games for the season come to be conference games, it's quite possible that the SEC and ACC will rise in these rankings, and that's reasonable in the grand scheme of things (another factor that will kick in is that better teams will play more games from this point forward). As always, there is no moral component to scheduling, so the only real difference is in how well the different power conferences are prepared for the postseason. Hopefully, though, this will provide a better gauge of how the conferences have played so far.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East   Florida State         Coastal Carolina      UCLA
A10            Clemson               UC Irvine             Arizona
CAA            North Carolina State  UC Riverside          South Carolina
Horizon        North Carolina        Cal State Fullerton   Kentucky
Ivy            Virginia              Long Beach State      Vanderbilt
MAAC           Miami, Florida        East Carolina         Arkansas
MAC            Stetson               Rice                  Mississippi State
MEAC           Texas                 Southern Mississippi  Mississippi
Mid-Continent  Oklahoma State        Memphis               Louisiana State
Mountain West  Missouri              Tulane                Florida
NEC            Oklahoma              Wichita State         College of Charleston
OVC            Texas A&M             Southern Illinois     Western Carolina
Patriot        Nebraska              Evansville            Louisiana-Lafayette
Southland      Kansas State          Oregon State          Troy
SWAC           Louisville            Arizona State         Pepperdine
WAC            Minnesota             Southern California   San Diego

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

The Wilson count is a correction based on an actual pitch count.

(*) Pitch count is estimated. As always, I welcome actual pitch count corrections.

Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> New Conference ISR's

About the author, Boyd Nation