Fun with numbers
- Thread starter Elmer
- Start date
Everyone else least competitive sport"???? These are the major sports i.e. the ones that everyone is interested in and I think I will be happy to throw in baseball as well once we start conference play. As for soccer, tennis, softball, track, volleyball etc, do what you want to w/ them.
If you are going to criticize, it's that this grossly underweights football, the most important sport by most measures, because there are only 8 games. Probably would be more useful to do an average of the winning percentage of all three sports, or average conference finish (or finish for football and current standings for basketball).
Look, I LOVE our girls basketball team. But dont act like its a "major" sport in the SEC. Its made leaps and bounds and i'm so happy that it has but the only "major" sports in the SEC are football, MBB, and baseball
Regardless of how cooked these numbers are, Ole Miss athletic dept is ****. So just for that this list is funny as hell.
The Big Three NCAA Sports National are Football and Men’s and Women’s Basketball.... Track and Field is probably next, Followed by Softball, Baseball, Gymnastics, Soccer, Golf, Tennis, Men’s/Women’s Ice Hockey, Equestrian and Bowling...
It’s true that WBB isn’t a major SEC sport.
It’s also true that OM’s athletic department sucks ***.
It’s also true that OM’s athletic department sucks ***.
I’m going to need to hear an explanation as to how WBB is on the same level as football and MBB
There is no big three. There is a big two. Then I guess it's women's basketball based on national viewership numbers.
Although I think it's also possible women's basketball is actually number 3 at very few schools, but just very consistently #4 at a lot of schools where as the #3 sports is sort of idiosyncratic depending on what part of the country you're in. It's basically #4 behind football, basketball, and baseball at most of the SEC. I'm guessing hockey is ahead of it in places where hockey is big. I'm guessing a handful of schools put men's soccer ahead of it? A handful of particularly douchey schools may put LaCrosse ahead of it? But women's basketball is probably always around that third of fourth slot at a particular school, whereas those other sports completely fall off the map when they are not 4th, with many schools not even carrying them as a scholarship sport.
Its absolutely not close to the same level as football and MBB, but I'll begrudgingly say that WBB is 3rd overall at this point even above baseball. But it makes sense given basketball is an indoor sport that can be played anywhere while a lot of the outdoor sports (including baseball) don't work well when being played up North during the school calendar months.
TV Viewership NCAA Men’s Baseball Finals Game 3 Vandy vs Michigan (largest viewing audience since 2014) 2.02 Million TV Viewers....
Women’s 2017 Basketball Final USC vs MSU 3.83 Million Viewers....
Women’s 2017 Basketball Final USC vs MSU 3.83 Million Viewers....
Part of that is because every college in America at the D1 level plays and cares about basketball, men's and women's. The other factor is that women's basketball gets way more coverage and exposure on the major ESPN networks throughout the entire season most every night than college baseball ever thought about. Most SEC baseball games are covered by the SEC network.
And 19 million watched Virginia - Texas Tech last year. And 25.5 million watched LSU - Clemson.
So, as others have said, while WBB might be third, there is no "big three." There's a big two, and then WBB leads a close group that includes baseball and softball (maybe others that I'm unaware of, too).
Women's college basketball has consistently had higher ratings than college baseball for many years now.
This seems accurate.
My question is, if we never hired Schaefer & remained irrelevant in the WBB world, would anyone here argue that WBB is nationally relevant?
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Ok, since we have some people being little bitches, here are the overall SEC records for the sports that have been played or are currently being played (football, soccer, volleyball, mbb, wbb):
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Here is football and MBB only:
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ETA: Keep in mind that Vandy doesn't sponsor volleyball, so while Ole Miss has 3 more overall wins than Vanderbilt, they actually have a lower win pct. (.240 vs .290)
| School | W | L | T |
| Florida | 34 | 15 | 1 |
| Texas A&M | 33 | 16 | 1 |
| South Carolina | 31 | 15 | 3 |
| Kentucky | 30 | 18 | 1 |
| LSU | 28 | 19 | 2 |
| Georgia | 27 | 20 | 3 |
| Tennessee | 27 | 21 | 2 |
| Missouri | 21 | 28 | 1 |
| Arkansas | 20 | 28 | 1 |
| Alabama | 20 | 27 | 2 |
| Mississippi State | 18 | 29 | 3 |
| Auburn | 16 | 34 | 0 |
| Ole Miss | 12 | 35 | 3 |
| Vanderbilt | 9 | 21 | 1 |
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Here is football and MBB only:
| School | W | L |
| LSU | 14 | 0 |
| Auburn | 10 | 5 |
| Alabama | 10 | 4 |
| Florida | 10 | 5 |
| Tennessee | 9 | 6 |
| Texas A&M | 8 | 7 |
| Kentucky | 8 | 6 |
| Georgia | 8 | 7 |
| Mississippi State | 7 | 8 |
| South Carolina | 6 | 8 |
| Missouri | 5 | 10 |
| Ole Miss | 3 | 12 |
| Arkansas | 3 | 11 |
| Vanderbilt | 1 | 13 |
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ETA: Keep in mind that Vandy doesn't sponsor volleyball, so while Ole Miss has 3 more overall wins than Vanderbilt, they actually have a lower win pct. (.240 vs .290)
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I dunno. If we never hired Ron Polk, would anybody here argue that baseball is nationally relevant?
Did you include cold chicken tenders in UM's records. I dont see that anywhere. Isn't it a minor sport?
You've stumbled into a perfect example of why this exercise is so stupid. Any metric that says Alabama, for the school year 2019-20, is among the worst athletic departments in the conference is obviously useless. They're arguably on track to be second best behind LSU.
They very well could make the NCAAT, compete for a national championship in softball (they're preseason #1), and are currently 7th nationally in gymnastics. That cannot possibly be described as "pretty awful," even if they were straight up terrible in every other sport, which they're not. But whatever. I've reached my quota of defending Alabama for the day.
We started off with "other than football." We've now eliminated every sport you don't personally care about and used the least charitable language possible to describe their two basketball teams. After doing all that, I agree that they suck.
Thanks for posting this along with where the #s came from. Those complaining prefer emotional rants over data. There seems to a lot of them on here.
Women's gymanstics only has 62 Div I programs, and a lot of those are not schools with massive subsidies from football, so I'm not sure being outside of the top 10% of programs is a good performance by them. That's probably underachieving a little bit? Maybe not though if the south is a bad place to find gymnasts.