You said “Wisconsin is better than them”. I don’t think that is necessarily true. Wisconsin is certainly different than them, but not necessarily better.

Wisconsin is going to line up and run the ball, where Illinois spreads you out and threatens to run or pass. The whole philosophy is different, and I don’t know that you can fairly compare the two.

Sorry to get all John Madden on you, but the key to this game is points, if we can score on their defense (21 or more) we’re going to win, maybe even easily. Just like last year. If we have turnovers (like they did last year) and get conservative, it’s going to be a tough, tough night.

This game will be decided by him. If Joe plays it wrong, they win. If Joe plays it right, we win. All of the analysis is meaningless. The coaches have to be willing to run with what got them to 6-0 and that’s not what always happens with Joe.

someone get that man an Ironman award for most positions played in the first half of a season.

You list both PSU and Wisky as having allowed only 6 sacks this season. However, PSU’s rank in that stat is listed as 4th, while Wisky is 25th. Which one is correct?

I think that category swings to a small Wisky advantage if 6 sacks allowed really equates to 4th ranked in D1A.

when running the ball, but it’s a push when we pass, according to the chart. That’s surprising, as the discussion of Joe’s presser had us thinking that they’ll be able to stop our run, perhaps, but not the pass.

Regardless, we need some compentency in both to open up the other.

is that they show our performance against the teams we have played so far. I would wager that it is easier to run/pass/score/defend/etc against the teams we have played than against the teams Wisky has played.

I think a better stat comparison (which would take more time, granted) would be to grade our performance as compared to the stats of the teams we’ve played so far, averaged over their games (and even more ideal would for THOSE stats to be normalized as well). It should be possible for someone with statistical background and sufficient time on their hands.

What I mean is this:
Say we ran 180 yards against Team A, and they’ve been giving up on average 120 yards, with a standard deviation of 30 yards. Then that means we performed 2 standard deviations above the mean for rushing that day (which is pretty significant). We then figure out the average “standard deviation” for all our games, and perform that for other teams as well to see how we rank.

This would correct a lot of the “We have 250 yards rushing per game, so we’re the best in the country” when each of those games were against teams who have, on average, given up over 200 yards per game no matter who they played against.

As I said, it would be good for those stats to go at least one level deeper, and see how the opponents of opponents rank, etc (like how SOS and I think RPI are calculated, but this would be for each individual stat), but that would probably complicate things too much.

This, of course, wouldn’t take into account games where you only effectively “play” for one half, and put your third stringers in for the second half, etc., but neither does the current system.

If I can find a good stats reference where I could pull easy to format numbers for all teams, then perhaps I’ll set something up like this myself (though by all means, if someone out there has better experience/ideas/access than me, go ahead. Just like the Penn State Bar map, I don’t mind coming up with the ideas for other people to implement).

This might be tough to really “rank” all the teams in the country, but it would probably be easy enough to do for a matchup basis.

It would be interesting to see how this would change certain rankings.