This is one heck of a time for Bill to ask me to start doing my Cygarin Ratings analysis again, only to probably ruin my reputation. Either that or Jarrod Hufford is on to something.
The Cygarin Ratings suggest that Texas is indeed human, and it shows Iowa State as being favored by 3-points, which reflects a 57% chance of winning. Basically the Clones and the Horns appear even up at this moment in time, and Iowa State gets the benefit of the homefield advantage.
I’m in a bit of disbelief myself and have been looking the data over and over again to find any sort of error, bias, or missing information, or something. I can’t. Tangibly we are favored. What intangibles will play into this game…I don’t know. One of them is, of course…it’s Texas.
So what’s going on?
The Cygarin Ratings is based on the Sagarin Ratings, as most of you know. Sagarin rates teams on how they have done over the entire season. It’s an average (sort of, not exactly), that acts as kind of a report card for the whole semester, not how teams have done since mid-terms.
Sagarin currently has Iowa State ranked 34th (Predictor) which historically is pretty good. Pre-Campbell, that was a bit of a high bar for the Clones. When we consider how badly ISU played at the beginning of the season, the guys must be playing pretty darned good to lift the overall average up to 34th.
And we are!
Indeed, Iowa State is playing FAR better since Oklahoma. Actually, arguably you can go all the way back to Oklahoma State as the start of when we saw much better play happening. If you include OSU, Oklahoma stands out as a huge outlier performance sandwiched between two good performances against OSU and TCU, two very good teams where we played well. Either way, Iowa State has been playing good and getting far better since about that time.
And by FAR better, I mean that Kansas is the only game since OU that this team has played five points below their current Sagarin Rating. Indeed the good guys are averaging about ten points above their current rating since then.
Sagarin can’t recognize this, but I will…remove the three single touchdown-costing plays in the Kansas game, and you can add 21 points to that performance as well. Factor that in, this team is averaging 15 points per game better than their current rating. Wow! Only the Kansas game stands as a glitch in a continuously trending up performance since OU.
But, we did indeed make those mistakes in the Kansas game and others, so we do have to realize that we are talking about our aunts and not potential uncles. Even then though, with those warts included in the performance evaluation…the Clones are still playing 12 points above their rating over the last five games since Oklahoma.
I took an even more conservative approach and adjusted Iowa State’s Cygarin Rating up by only ten…even though I can make an argument for as much as 15.
That brings Iowa State’s performance since Oklahoma equal to a team ranked 10th in the country based on power ratings. And if you view it with a little common sense, if we had not blown the Ohio and Kansas games, and had lost to only Iowa and OU (both likely destined to CCG’s), being ranked 10th wouldn’t necessarily have been unreasonable.
On the other hand, Oklahoma is the only marker we have to evaluate how we would do against caliber opponents ranked higher than lower top-25. So maybe the data we do have is not representative of how we might do against top-10 teams in general.
So…there’s all that when considering how Iowa State is performing coming into the Texas game.
Now Texas…..
The Longhorns are going the other way. They have been trending down over the second half of the season. Not nearly as profoundly as Iowa State’s trend up…but it’s there. I could make an argument for 5 points lower, but they are fluctuating a lot and that makes it hard to pinpoint an actual performance level.
Sagarin currently has Texas rated 9th in the country. (I have Iowa State adjusted to 10th….see where this is going?)
But if they are playing 5 points lower than their rating, then Texas may not be a top-10 caliber team after all, not right now anyway. They lost to Oklahoma by four, but they did beat Kansas State at home by three. KSU at home though, drops under top-10 caliber.
Texas walloped Kansas 40-14 the fifth game into the season, a peak performance that was roughly equivalent to their earlier beating of Alabama. But ever since then, their performance on Saturdays has been sliding, with only one performance above their current rating, and four performances at or below it. Is it a trend? Or just playing no better than needed to win?
The “below” performances include ten-point under performances against TCU (winning by three points) last game, and Houston a few weeks ago. TCU is a top-25 power ranked team, and Longhorns winning by only three points…at home…may be suggestive of their recent abilities.
So as it is, I tweaked Texas down by only one point, almost nothing. But I could make a pretty sane argument that they could be dropped five or six. If I had done that, it would show Iowa State favored by eight or nine points, but I just can’t see Texas playing that much lower when they need to.
So to sum up Texas, take their 10th rating, subtract a recent performance point, subtract 3 points for Iowa State having home field advantage, Texas is a 18th point equivalent rated opponent in Jack Trice.
So in nutshell….
What the Cygarin Ratings see is two teams seemingly meeting at a crossroads of trends, with one team trending up profoundly, and the other trending down somewhat. Resultantly both teams appear to be meeting when they are playing at about the same level, or perhaps even Iowa State playing better.
Do I buy it? As hard as the numbers are to believe, I think I do. At least that I think we can compete.
But, we have been here before. Texas could go all “Alabama” on us, or Iowa State could go all “Kansas”, or both. But that does not take away what appears to be that the good guys have a better than even chance going into this game, assuming that we play good ball and don’t make costly mistakes.
The Cygarin Ratings can only evaluate tangible performance to date, and on paper anyway it shows Iowa State to be a slight favorite. The rest is up to Campbell and the players.
As far as us fans go, I don’t see any reason to not think we can't go into this game believing we are credible equals to the Longhorns.…so long as our young players keep their heads in the game and the can keep it clean and free from major errors.
(In my opinion.)
