My NCAA Playoff Rankings Stats Audit Confirms JMU Should Be In The College Playoff Standings Over Tulane
No Fox College Football social media intern. I do not agree.
I am here to make the case for James Madison to take the place of Tulane at #24 on the rankings which you can't even see from the trimmed image. I respectfully ask the College Football Playoff Committee consider the facts soon to be laid out. Was I commissioned by someone to do this? Am I even a real JMU fan? Do I even know who their quarterback is or if they even have one?
Those are questions that don't matter. What matters is evidence. And after an overnight audit of the relevant stats, my algo noticed some irregularities with Tulane's standing.
Now I'm not here to tell you I even really understand how the college playoff system works. I watched a two minute YouTube video to get clarity and can say I understand it a little bit less after watching. But I get the gist. You have your conference winners and your at large bids. The path JMU must take is an at large bit. And JMU and Tulame are at crosshairs.
Let's see what my stat run came up with overnight. Here's a quick fact sheet constitution.
JMU is 9-1. Tulame is 8-2. After a long midnight neural network machine learning model ran and hit my desk to confirm, I can tell you that 9-1 is actually better. Now of course, if it were all up to records this exercise would be easy. I get that. You can make the case that Tulane has played better opponents. OK. Fine. But let's dive into that a little more.
JMU beat Louisiana who beat Marshall who beat Texas State who beat UTSA who beat Tulame. Interesting. UTSA is ranked #81 on CBS Sports. The worst team JMU lost to is ranked #35 on that list. Louisville. Their only loss. That right there should disregard strength of opponent seeing as how we can't prove JMU wouldn't beat better teams but we can prove Tulane loses to worse teams.
Let's chat spreads real quick. Further proof that JMU is severely underrated is the fact that they have a combined spread result of +92.5 this season. So if they were favored by 10 and won by 20 in a game, that'd be a +10 for example. Add everything up and that's what you get. Meanwhile - Tulame comes in at -37. This is really your smoking gun if you ask me. This proves how massively overrated the green Wave is. Think about it. Tell me when the last time you were impressed with a November Green wave in the polls? I'll wait.
The in-game numbers registered as significant on the algo as well. Offense is a pretty important part of football. The most points you can score on a drive is via what's called a "touchdown". Just being crystal clear with this in case there's confusion with the committee. JMU is scoring on 40.5% of their drives. Drives are the set of downs offenses get to try to score. Again - don't want to leave anyone on the committee behind. Tulame is only at a 31.5% clip. Defense is the second most important part of football. JMU is only allowing touchdowns on 16% of drives vs Tulame's 30.6%. Almost double, folks.
(I'm not sure how JMU only has 100 defensive drives vs 106 offensive but the algo says what the algo says)
In fairness, we must be willing to be wrong and hear out the opposing view points. Madison wouldn't have it any other way. Let's hear from Tulane's coach Jon Sumrall to defend his team's position.
This needs to be fixed as soon as possible. James Madison and his wife Ashley would be rolling in their graves to see the list of rankings set on paper with no underlaying structure to protect it. We can't let these ideologues make these decisions like this. There must be structure and balance of powers.