October 11, 2003: Arizona State 59, Oregon 14

Arizona State must have been far and away a better team than Oregon in 2003... right? Actually, not at all.

Outside this game, Arizona State was 3-7, while Oregon was 8-4. Looking at their common opponents:

1. Oregon 34, Oregon State 20
2. Oregon State 45, Arizona State 17


3. Oregon 31, UCLA 13
4. UCLA 20, Arizona State 13


5. Oregon 21, California 17
6. California 51, Arizona State 23


7. Oregon 35, Stanford 0
8. Stanford 38, Arizona State 27


9. Oregon 48, Arizona 10
10. Arizona State 28, Arizona 7


11. Oregon 16, Washington State 55
12. Arizona State 19, Washington State 34

The transitive point differences for these six game pairs are 42, 25, 32, 46, 17, and -24 points, making Oregon appear 23 points better, on average.

Oregon beat #5 Michigan. The best team Arizona State beat was Oregon, and the next best was #84 North Carolina. Oregon only lost by only 1 to #27 Minnesota, and by 4 to #23 Utah. Arizona State had no such "quality losses."

By every other standard, Oregon proved far stronger than ASU. No reasonable rankings, computer or human, would place Arizona State above Oregon. And yet Arizona State destroyed Oregon in their head-to-head match-up.

The moral of the story is never be too smug about your team. Next week they might get fumigated by Eastern North Dakota Polytech JV. This is why I engage in this hobby... It's a fun intellectual challenge to digest such contradictions and try to make sense of the resulting rankings.

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