West Virginia’s slobber knocking of Oklahoma State last week drew the attention of the nation, but most especially Iowa State fans, whose Cyclones play the Mountaineers this Saturday night. To understand what that means for the upcoming game, we need to take a good, hard look at the Cowboys’ performance this year.
I’ll do that now, otherwise the Cygarin Ratings this week be way too long for anybody to want to read.
In short, the Cowboys are in a downward death spiral with no end in sight yet. Just about every game they have played this year has been a worse performance than the one prior, at least with relevant opponents.
Right now, Sagarin has OSU at 40th in the country, but that is a season-long average that includes two Sisters of the Poor. They haven’t played at that level in any of their last three games against Utah, Kansas State, and West Virginia, losing them all.
They did notch a win over 31st Arkansas earlier, but that was a double overtime win at home, and that turns out to be a 65th power ranked performance in regulation play. So even that is not impressive and represents the high-water mark for Gundy’s Guys this season.
The Pokes’ other two games were wins (Tulsa & SDSU) but those were sub-100 opponents and are inflated wins margin-wise. In the big picture these games have really no relevance regarding how OSU is playing against P4 caliber teams in the meat of the conference race.
So, take out the Tulsa and SDSU performances, the Cowboys are playing a full 14 points per game lower than their current 40th power rating. 40th is bad enough for a Gundy team…but this puts the Pokes at a staggering performance ranking of about 100th... which is the worst in the conference by a pretty good margin.
To be fair, the huge WVU loss margin-wise was exceptional, so if you take that game out too as an anomaly, then that pulls the Cowboys up to roughly 80th.
Though WVU should probably be considered an outlier, the loss should be “detuned” a skosh, but not necessarily eliminated entirely. After all it was still obviously an under performance. So 80th is being a bit gratuitous, and OSU’s performance then lies somewhere south of 80th.
OSU’s trend over time is even more remarkable. This is how their season has played out game-to-game…
SDSU 19.72 over performance
ARKANSAS: -1.46 under
@ TULSA 10.74 over
UTAH 2.75 under
@ KSU 12.60 under
WVU -26.35 under
As you can see, there has been a steady…and drastic… overall downward trend since playing Tulsa. And even more pronounced against anybody relevant.
Interestingly, if you could see the graph, the downward trend has been so consistent that it suggested a projected 20-point loss. So under the circumstances, not only is OSU indicating to be really, really bad overall this year...the 24-point loss actually closely fits the trend.
No matter how you analyze OSU…it’s bad. And there is not a single piece of data that hints at good. On a train that was already off the rails going into last week…the wheels apparently flew completely off against West Virginia…in front of their own fans.
It may turn out that OSU stays that bad the rest of the season. On the other hand, to be fair to OSU…they have played the toughest conference schedule to date by far, and it will get easier for them going forward. They still have a chance to rebound, but they certainly have nothing to show for themselves to date, and most especially against West Virginia.
For the record...I did no research into why OSU might be struggling and didn’t look at any of the OSU-WVU game statistics. I’ll leave that up to readers who have more knowledge on that than I do. But not only is this situation highly unusual for a Mike Gundy team…this is unimaginably Gene Chizik bad.
So to wrap up…..
The relevance of WVU’s 24-point slobber knocking of Oklahoma State is a nothingburger. It’s a flush game with regards to analyzing West Virginia. Throw it out.
We will talk about the rest of WVU's season's performance in detail in this week’s forthcoming Cygarin Ratings update.
(In my opinion.)
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