No doubt calculated before the recent Florida kerfuffle....but seriously, they have Clemson on the way upper right quadrant as a "clean" powerhouse program.....
I think if the fort mods made a grid with their inside knowledge, it might look a little different....I mean, geez, OSU is higher on the "admirable" scale? Tennessee?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-footballs-2017-grid-of-shame-1504194945
College Football’s 2017 Grid of Shame
In an annual tradition, The Wall Street Journal evaluates the country’s top teams and how much their fans need to be embarrassed—or proud—of their program’s off-the-field behavior
Former Mississippi football coach Hugh Freeze put his old school in an unenviable spot on the Grid of Shame thanks to an ongoing scandal in which he allegedly used university phones to contact escort services on recruiting trips. PHOTO: ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Andrew Beaton
Updated Aug. 31, 2017 12:16 p.m. ET
14 COMMENTS
Winning goes a long way in college football. It packs stadiums, brings in money and can even lead to the glory of a national championship. But at many programs, there’s a qualifier for evaluating that winning: How much did fans have to grit their teeth and pinch their noses on their way to those victories?
This is the awkward harmony of college football. There’s what happens on the field, which grips fans like nothing else on Saturdays. Then there’s what goes on off the field, which may be the only thing capable of overshadowing the football itself.
Now the season is set to kick into full gear this weekend, with the first full slate of games for most teams in the country. Which means it’s time for The Wall Street Journal’s annual Grid of Shame, an exercise that quantifies answers to the two most important questions about your favorite team: How good are they? And how embarrassed should you be about them?
For the top programs in the country—all 64 teams from the five major conferences and selected others that belong in any college football conversation—the Grid calculates answers to both of these questions. It’s mostly pure numbers, with the slight help of college football’s invisible hand to fix anything that doesn’t come through in the data.
The simple part to understand is the horizontal axis: It measures how good a team is actually expected to be on the field this season. This is based on a survey of preseason evaluations. Some of the rankings use the eye test. Others base theirs off complex algorithms. On this axis, you want your team to be as far right as possible—where you’ll find No. 1 Alabama.
The vertical axis—also known as the shame meter—is the more complicated endeavor. The basis of it is still in raw data. It begins with a weighted calculation of academic performance, recent NCAA violations and probation, attendance figures, athletic-department subsidies and player arrests. Also, schools got demerits for questionable histories of injury mismanagement, like the many involved in concussion-related lawsuits.
A Closer Look: How Admirable is Your Football Team?
Except anybody who knows anything about shame in college football knows that even this rich set of data doesn’t fully capture the breadth of scandal and disgrace possible in this sport. For example, how do you quantify what has gone on at Ole Miss? The school faces not just an investigation for NCAA violations, but also a sticky situation in which the coach, Hugh Freeze, left after revelations he called escorts on his university cellphone. Meanwhile, the school’s former coach, Houston Nutt, is embroiled in a contentious legal battle with the school.
We’re not singling out Ole Miss. After years of questions and investigations, North Carolina met with the NCAA Committee on Infractions in August to discuss allegations of what essentially amounted to fake classes for athletes over the course of nearly two decades.
Former Baylor President Kenneth Starr, who lost his job in the wake of a sexual-assault scandal that continues to trail the school as it seeks to move on under new leadership. PHOTO: LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
And how does any number capture or compare to what went on at Baylor, where alleged incidents of domestic and sexual assault, and how they were handled, cost the jobs of the football coach, Art Briles, and university president, Kenneth Starr ?
These situations help explain the “ick” factor. No metric may fully encapsulate the scope of these situations at a particular program. But they have to be measured somehow, so we penalize teams for the things that bring shame to their fans but may not show up in any spreadsheet.
So the best and least shameful teams find themselves in the grid’s top right quadrant, an area that includes Washington, a College Football Playoff semifinalist from a year ago that has also run a pretty clean ship in recent years. The grid’s top left belongs to the teams like California that may not actually win so many football games this year, but at least they won’t embarrass themselves off the field on the way to those losses.
How Embarrassing is Your Football Team?
The grid’s bottom right includes a bevy of the best programs in the country. But these are also the schools that have, in one way or another, put their fans through some public ignominy to get there.
Then there’s the grid’s bottom left. No team wants to be in the bottom left. It’s where the win totals are low and the shame is high. And where fans might be better off choosing a different school sports team to support on weekends this fall.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
I think if the fort mods made a grid with their inside knowledge, it might look a little different....I mean, geez, OSU is higher on the "admirable" scale? Tennessee?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-footballs-2017-grid-of-shame-1504194945
College Football’s 2017 Grid of Shame
In an annual tradition, The Wall Street Journal evaluates the country’s top teams and how much their fans need to be embarrassed—or proud—of their program’s off-the-field behavior
Former Mississippi football coach Hugh Freeze put his old school in an unenviable spot on the Grid of Shame thanks to an ongoing scandal in which he allegedly used university phones to contact escort services on recruiting trips. PHOTO: ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By
Andrew Beaton
Updated Aug. 31, 2017 12:16 p.m. ET
14 COMMENTS
Winning goes a long way in college football. It packs stadiums, brings in money and can even lead to the glory of a national championship. But at many programs, there’s a qualifier for evaluating that winning: How much did fans have to grit their teeth and pinch their noses on their way to those victories?
This is the awkward harmony of college football. There’s what happens on the field, which grips fans like nothing else on Saturdays. Then there’s what goes on off the field, which may be the only thing capable of overshadowing the football itself.
Now the season is set to kick into full gear this weekend, with the first full slate of games for most teams in the country. Which means it’s time for The Wall Street Journal’s annual Grid of Shame, an exercise that quantifies answers to the two most important questions about your favorite team: How good are they? And how embarrassed should you be about them?
For the top programs in the country—all 64 teams from the five major conferences and selected others that belong in any college football conversation—the Grid calculates answers to both of these questions. It’s mostly pure numbers, with the slight help of college football’s invisible hand to fix anything that doesn’t come through in the data.
The simple part to understand is the horizontal axis: It measures how good a team is actually expected to be on the field this season. This is based on a survey of preseason evaluations. Some of the rankings use the eye test. Others base theirs off complex algorithms. On this axis, you want your team to be as far right as possible—where you’ll find No. 1 Alabama.
The vertical axis—also known as the shame meter—is the more complicated endeavor. The basis of it is still in raw data. It begins with a weighted calculation of academic performance, recent NCAA violations and probation, attendance figures, athletic-department subsidies and player arrests. Also, schools got demerits for questionable histories of injury mismanagement, like the many involved in concussion-related lawsuits.
A Closer Look: How Admirable is Your Football Team?
Except anybody who knows anything about shame in college football knows that even this rich set of data doesn’t fully capture the breadth of scandal and disgrace possible in this sport. For example, how do you quantify what has gone on at Ole Miss? The school faces not just an investigation for NCAA violations, but also a sticky situation in which the coach, Hugh Freeze, left after revelations he called escorts on his university cellphone. Meanwhile, the school’s former coach, Houston Nutt, is embroiled in a contentious legal battle with the school.
We’re not singling out Ole Miss. After years of questions and investigations, North Carolina met with the NCAA Committee on Infractions in August to discuss allegations of what essentially amounted to fake classes for athletes over the course of nearly two decades.
Former Baylor President Kenneth Starr, who lost his job in the wake of a sexual-assault scandal that continues to trail the school as it seeks to move on under new leadership. PHOTO: LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
And how does any number capture or compare to what went on at Baylor, where alleged incidents of domestic and sexual assault, and how they were handled, cost the jobs of the football coach, Art Briles, and university president, Kenneth Starr ?
These situations help explain the “ick” factor. No metric may fully encapsulate the scope of these situations at a particular program. But they have to be measured somehow, so we penalize teams for the things that bring shame to their fans but may not show up in any spreadsheet.
So the best and least shameful teams find themselves in the grid’s top right quadrant, an area that includes Washington, a College Football Playoff semifinalist from a year ago that has also run a pretty clean ship in recent years. The grid’s top left belongs to the teams like California that may not actually win so many football games this year, but at least they won’t embarrass themselves off the field on the way to those losses.
How Embarrassing is Your Football Team?
The grid’s bottom right includes a bevy of the best programs in the country. But these are also the schools that have, in one way or another, put their fans through some public ignominy to get there.
Then there’s the grid’s bottom left. No team wants to be in the bottom left. It’s where the win totals are low and the shame is high. And where fans might be better off choosing a different school sports team to support on weekends this fall.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
