We've been quiet for a while here at the Tempo-Free Gridiron (we actually do have day jobs, unfortunately) but starting tomorrow we'll be back with our 2009 Bowl Previews. We've ranked all 34 bowls according to our Competitive/Quality Rating (CQR) and will be giving you a bowl-by-bowl breakdown from the least interesting to most interesting bowls. As the name indicates, CQR considers both how competitive the game should be as well as the quality of the opponents. We've taken data from both my TFG rankings and predictions and Eddie's RBA system to derive this list. The two main inputs to CQR are:
- Competitiveness: How close is this game expected to be? The closer the odds are to 50-50, the higher the competitiveness portion.
- Quality: How good are the teams involved? The higher their collective power rating/winning percentage across the two systems, the higher the quality metric.
These two are then combined to give us a Competitive/Quality Rating for the game. Games are rated on a scale of 0-100, with a perfect 100 being a neutral-field game between two teams that have perfect 1.000 power ratings in both systems. A "perfect" 0 is not actually possible, since two teams with 0.000 power rating would get a 0 on the Quality metric, but a perfect score on the Competitive metric. One team would have to have at least a 0.001, leading to a 100% chance of victory against the helpless opponent while still giving a near-0 Quality rating.
As you'll see during our previews, most bowl games fall into the 50-70 range on the CQR scale, whereas the top-tier bowl games fall into the 70-80 range. The proliferation of bowl games, however, means that we'll see many games down in the 40s and even 30s on the CQR scale. We'll dispatch of those quickly, however, and get to the good previews at a clip of about three games per day (with Christmas off, of course).
Stay tuned.
