AP Poll Analysis

Here are some interesting facts about the AP poll and the teams ahead of us:

This is the list of teams ranked ahead of us with one loss, who have played teams with a worse won -loss record than the Bears have played:

East Carolina
Illinois
Oregon
Ohio State
Fresno State
Georgia Tech
Michigan State (we beat them, but that doesn't seem to matter to the pollsters).
North Carolina
Miami
Auburn
Florida State

Here is the list of teams with one loss that their opponents have a better record than our opponents:

West Virginia

Our one loss is to a 3-1 Maryland team. I am not saying that they are a tremendous team, but they are not crap, as everyone has been led to believe. i think they win three or four more games, make a bowl, and end up with 7 or 8 wins. Not too shabby. If that is our let-down loss for the year, I can live with that. They may make even more noise in an ACC division that is not so great.

All of this will take care of itself as the year rolls on. The Maryland loss will not look so bad (it already does not) and the rest of the Pac 10 will shake out with three terrible teams (who lose everything), two really bad teams (who beat the terrible teams but no one else) and I think three teams who beat everyone else except the top two (ASU, Oregon and Arizona), and then Cal, who loses to USC. If that were the scenario, Cal and SC would have beaten three 8 win Pac 10 teams, and would have the resume to make the big games. Including what I believe will be a decent Michigan State team, the Bears will have beaten about half of their opponents who have winning seasons - in other words, bowl bound teams. And lost to two bowl bound teams - Maryland and USC.

The only issue is to get the Media off the Pac 10 bashing - that could be hard this year with the crappy out of conference showing. Last year, the Pac 10 got lost of big props for playing a tough out of conference schedule, and doing well. This year, we got creamed on our out of conference schedule. Oh well.

GO BEARS!!