Here are some interesting stats on the current BCS top 10:
| Team | Off. PPG |
Def. PPG . | Difference |
Sagarin SOS | A&H SOS |
|||||||||||||||
|
. |
Texas | 45.6 | 18.4 | 27.2 | 18 | 15 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Alabama | 31.9 | 13.8 | 18.1 | 49 | 33 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Penn State | 41.8 | 11.1 | 30.7 | 64 | 46 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Oklahoma | 48.3 | 22.5 | 25.8 | 41 | 26 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
USC | 38 | 8.1 | 29.9 | 6 | 28 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Georgia | 34.3 | 20.3 | 14 | 23 | 22 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Texas Tech | 48 | 21.2 | 26.8 | 91 | 108 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Florida | 42 | 11.9 | 30.1 | 24 | 20 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Oklahoma State |
43.6 | 21.5 | 22.1 | 46 | 27 |
||||||||||||||
|
. |
Utah | 39 | 18.6 | 20.4 |
85 |
After hearing all about how weak the Pac 10 is, I find it pretty funny that in a purely mathematical sense USC has had the toughest schedule by a wide margin compared to the rest of the BCS top ten coupled with one of the best point differentials under Sagarin's predictor calculation (which is a includes point spread). Even Adnerson and Hester, who do not use point spread in the SOS calculation, have USC rated very comparably to their peers. Certainly SC's SOS ranking will drop as the year goes on, but not to such a point where one could truthfully say that the team played significantly inferior competition.
Strangely enough, it is not all that surprising that USC's SOS is that high. Ohio State (ranked #12 in the BCS) is still a very nice win, and Virginia has started to rebound and currently holds the number 1 spot in the ACC Coastal division. None of this necessarily means that USC should be ranked higher, but what it does mean is that USC should not be discounted in the polls due to a weak schedule.
Finally, I would like to build a little bit on something Paragon mentioned earlier with regards to hypocrisy of the pollsters. During 2001 the BCS purposefully removed all computer systems that ranked teams according to Margin of victory. Moreover, in 2004 the BCS began weighting human polls twice as much as the computer systems. In essence, the BCS took away the single best predictor of who should win from the programmers and then turned around a few years later and increased the effect that style points have on the polls. In a backwards way the BCS actually encourages teams to run up the score more than they did before.