College PiRate Ratings DELAYED

The Reinstatement of the Pac-12, Mountain West, and Mid-American Conferences, as well as Independent UMass, has caused a somewhat lengthy delay in our college football ratings update for this coming week.

Because the PiRate Ratings use an algorithm with a cumulative par rating of 100.0 for the PiRate, Mean, and Bias ratings, we cannot simply place the original August ratings for the teams that decided in the last week to play football. Doing so would throw the cumulative par well below 100.0.

We cannot simply add the necessary amount needed per team to raise the par values to 100.0 for multiple reasons. First, the amount needed to be added to each of the three ratings would be totally different. Why would a team all of a sudden become .2 points better in the Mean, but .4 points better in the Bias? Actually, some teams might gain points in one rating and lose points in another. That would not be just or accurate.

Second, why would you reward a team with points that is obviously struggling at the present time, while at the same time punish a team that hasn’t played yet by keeping their rating where it was when everybody was 0-0?

When the Big Ten returned, we had to raise some ratings and lower others to keep the overall par at 100.0 for our three different algorithms, and to be quite frank, we had to use some one-time extracurricular data to come to a conclusion.

The need to reincorporate the teams is vital thanks to the Navy-Air Force game this weekend. The Mountain West is looking to return at the end of October, but the Air Force Academy is scheduled to play Navy this Saturday as part of the Commander-in-Chief Trophy series. We cannot issue power ratings for Air Force until we have done the work to reincorporate all the teams that will return to play in 2020.

As of this writing, the Pac-12, Mountain West, and Mid-American Conferences are on board with a late October or early November re-start. UMass plans to attempt to find some teams to play and hopefully get in six games. Old Dominion, New Mexico State, and Connecticut still plan to take off this season, but New Mexico State hopes to play a half-dozen games in the Spring against FCS, Division II, and possibly Connecticut with a remote possibility that they could play UMass.

As an aside to this, keep an eye on New Mexico State basketball coach Chris Jans. The Aggies are not completely sure their basketball team will be able to play in 2020-2021. If the Aggies cancel their basketball season, expect multiple Power Conference schools to move Jans up high on their lists of potential head coaches if they have a vacancy. If you follow our college basketball coverage, you know that we rate coaches by their ability to improve their teams’ offensive efficiency, while weakening their opponents’ offensive efficiencies. In the Winter of 2020, our analysis rated Jans as number one overall among Mid-Major and Low-Major coaches in his ability to improve the talent on his roster above the norm. In 2019, we named Eric Musselman, then of Nevada, as number one and predicted that a Power Conference school would hire him and not regret it. Arkansas was that fortunate school to hire Muss, and Muss has the Razorbacks moving forward toward a top 20 program quickly. It is our opinion that Jans has the competency to do for a Power Conference school what Musselman has done for Arkansas. If NMSU does not play basketball this season, we believe Jans will take another job for 2021-2022.