Originally posted by: sciencewhiz
Every conference has a few games they are expected to win, a few they are expected to lose, and one or two tossup games. It's how those teams do compared to expectations that tell us how good conferences really are. *
If you look at how casual college football fans ** picked the games, they significantly underrated the Big 10. Despite a mediocre record of 2-3, they were only expected to go 0-4 up to now, with Wisconsin/Arkansas being a tossup. Conversely, the Big East was supposed to win all their games, so the fact that they are undefeated doesn't really mean anything. Here are the stats for the BCS conferences as of right now.
* The normal disclaimers apply, especially that some teams play much better after a long layoff, and others play much worse, which can adversely affect how conferences look. See Dullard's post for more reasons:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=38&threadid=1975796&enterthread=y
** Using the opinions of over 100,000 people who participated in ESPN's College Bowl Mania.