Power Index, Week Four – The Conference Schedule awaits

Ohio State and Michigan continue to dip in the Power Index with respect to their rivals. Notre Dame took a big relative drop this week after their performance in East Lansing and boosted Michigan State’s place in the conference. The Golden Gophers jumped out of the cellar and judging from the pollster comments people are clearly keeping an eye on last year’s conference laughingstock.

The Big Ten season is upon us so we’ll certainly see some shake-ups and shake-outs in the next few weeks. Here’s the current index:

The comments from the pollsters:

Gilliam the Badger: “Did Michigan State prove something, or just confirm that the Irish suck? And did that nick the Wolverines self-esteem in Ann Arbor? We’ll see next week, when the Badgers roll into town. Apparently Iowa and Indiana are pretenders…or is Ball State just that good? Did CMU deserve to win? Should the Big Ten and MAC combine to form a super-conference? Do I only have questions this week?”

Biggie the Spartan: “Looking forward to opening the Big 10 season next week. We will see if Minnesota is legit when they play OSU. Wisconsin and Michigan is a a intriguing match-up and the marquee game will be Illinois @ PSU. We should find out a lot more about how these clubs will stack up with one another.”

Schlimmy the Buckeye: “Penn St. had been the most consistent Big 10 team so far, four dominating victories so far sets them up well for Big Ten play. Most disappointing team from last week has to be Indiana, losing at home to MAC team is never good, especially with conference play right around the corner.”

Shep the Domer: “Penn State as they continued to dominate, have showed up each week this season and impressed only problem is their schedule strength or lack thereof.”

Lew M Man, Hoosier Man: “Minnesota made the biggest jump – from 12th to better than IU and Northwestern and a notch below Iowa and ND, which isn’t saying much. I’m cautiously optimistic, in a Matt Millen sort of way, that Michigan will give Wisconsin a good battle this Saturday.”

2 Comments

  • GopherNation

    Two questions. What is the criteria which supports Michigan being ahead of Notre Dame? I have no with the ranking, just curious if there is a reason other than the fact that Mich is your team.

    More ranking logic…Bowling Green beats Pitt, Pitt beats Iowa, Minnesota beats Bowling Green. Therefore Minnesota > Iowa?

  • Greg

    Gopher, on the ND question – I don’t know if this explains the logic, but the index doesn’t reflect what happened necessarily in prior weeks, it projects how the teams would fare if they played the rest of the teams in the index on a neutral field “now”.

    You’ll note that this isn’t a Wolverine-biased blog, the teams are indexed by guys representing Wisconsin, Michigan State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, with a couple guys (including me) that went to Michigan and Indiana.

    If I’m guessing, folks feel that Michigan is bad, but was competitive against ND despite giving the ball away so many times. If they played on a neutral field again on Saturday, I’m thinking they’d at least be a toss up if not favored. Maybe that’s bias. After watching their performance against MSU (and I did, behind ND’s bench) the Irish looked pretty bad.

    One of the guidelines in the Index worksheet is that just b/c team A defeats team B in a game, that doesn’t require you to consider team A superior to team B all season.

    Hope that helps.