The Sports Thinker

The Quintuple C, home of the RaboBank Bandit Bowl I know I like to joke around a bit here and many of these B25 teams do seem to spend a lot of time in the poll, year after year, but I would like to note that both Arizona State and Indiana finished last year in the final B25 poll of 2023 and both are now among the 12 contenders in the playoff for the National Championship.  Things can change fast in the era of the portal and NIL deals. Florida State barely missed the National title playoff last year and were 2-10 this season, ranked at #6 in the B25 of 2024. Eight teams, beyond the two mentioned in the paragraph above, are also in real bowl games this season after being in the B25 final poll of 2023. To give credit where due, congratulations to Vanderbilt, East Carolina, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Baylor, Sam Houston, UConn and Colorado for propelling themselves up from the depths of college football into the daylight.  THE FICTIONAL BOWLS This year’s Lower Alabama Pest Control ...

Dix Stadium, home of Kent State University football Thi s final poll brought many quandaries as to where to rank certain teams. There are two general rules I apply when ranking teams with the same record: First, teams that won and teams with a BYE the previous week are ranked closer to #25 than teams that lost the previous week and second, teams that played each other are almost always ranked on the basis of the outcome of that game. That said, there were 13 teams in this final poll with identical 3-9 records. To add to the complications, only 3 of those teams, Ball State , Georgia State and Stanford , had not played a single one of the other 3-9 teams. And complicating even further, 7 of the remaining 10 teams were in one of two conferences, 4 in the AAC and 3 in Conference USA. Those 3 Conference USA teams, UTEP , New Mexico State and Middle Tennessee State each played the other two and all three ended up with identical 1-1 records against the other two. So...what to do? Some of t...