I was looking through this weeks BlogPoll ballots (because, yes, I have no life and I am that pathetic) and noticed that someone had actually voted for the Kansas Jayhawks.  Intrigued by that discovery I decided to look at the ballot and see who was actually that stupid and was rather surprised to see this.

I'm going to give whoever's in charge of filling that out the benefit of the doubt and assume that they really meant to vote for the Kansas State Wildcats.  However, that means that there exists at least one Iowa State fan who is somewhat fuzzy on the difference between K-State and KU despite the fact that ISU has been in a conference with both of them for about a century.  At any rate, if it's possible to change your vote, you might want to do that before anyone else notices.

Inspired by the transitive win/loss rankings mentioned here, and shamelessly ripping off the work of my team is better than your team.

I figured I would put together a list of who has bragging rights over who in the Big 12.  And then rank teams on that basis because rankings are cool. 

"Braggin' rights" for this purpose are acquired by beating teams.  When you beat a team you get braggin' rights over them and over every team they have braggin' rights over.  That's not limited to Big 12 or FBS games.  If Kansas any team in the Big 12 is bad enough to lose to an FCS team they deserve all the scorn and derision that that brings.*

The rankings are determined by giving each team 1 point for every other conference team they have braggin' rights over and subtracting 1 point for every team that has their braggin' rights.  Ties are broken however I feel like it, if at all.

*Interestingly, every Big 12 team that currently has braggin' rights on KU has those rights via NDSU.

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I'd been planning to post something along these lines as a response to one of the postgame threads, but I kept mulling it over and it kept growing so I made it a FanPost.

Overall grade: C-

And if it wasn't for the fumbled snap he'd be in C+/B- territory.  When you consider that we really just need a solid "B" at QB that's not terribly disheartening.

Things I liked:

11 of 16, 1 TD, no interceptions.

The winning 4th quarter drive.  He'd been having a fairly rough day at that point, but was still able to come in and manage the only sustained drive of the game to end in the south endzone.  He didn't throw a pass other than the last play, but that play was a nice little toss and catch on 3rd and goal from the 5.  That was a drive and a play that K-State really needed to put some real pressure on UCLA.

Converting 3rd downs on the opening drive.  Both 3rd downs K-State converted to keep that drive alive were on Coffman passes.  The 2nd one came after 3rd and 1 got backed up to 3rd and 6 on a false start.  In fact, overall he wasn't that bad passing on 3rd down:  3 completions that converted, 1 incompletion, and 3 sacks.  But none of the sacks knocked K-State out of field goal range or pinned them deep in their own end.

Things I didn't like:

Fumbled snap.  Don't care whose fault it was.  Completely unacceptable.  On your own 11 that goes double.

66 yards passing.   On the other hand it wasn't like anybody was tossing the ball all over the field Saturday.  Untill the last 2 minutes of the game--when UCLA went into desperation mode and K-State went into drain the clock mode--the QB stats looked like this:
Coffman     11/16  |  66yds  |  1 TD  |  0 INT
Prince         7/22  |  56yds  |  0 TD  |  1 INT

6 sacks for 34 yards.  At least half of those were simply from holding the ball too long.  Yes they are better than interceptions, but that kind of yardage loss just kills drives.  Especially for a K-State team that's not that explosive on offence in the first place.

Bottom line:

Carson Coffman showed a degree of ... grit ... mental toughness ... focus--whatever you want to call it--that's fairly encouraging.  He struggled with the technical aspects of the passing game Saturday, but not much more than UCLA's QB.  When you take the wind into account and the fact that it was the first game, it's not unreasonable that the passing games would appear pretty rough.  (By the way, if anybody wants to put together "against the wind" and "with the wind" passing numbers, I think they'd be kind of interesting.  But not enough to go through a play-by-play and compile the numbers myself.)  The fumbled snap was the only issue that really came anywhere close to costing the Wildcats the game.

All the problems he had are ones that should be fairly straightforward fixes.  I don't recall him having a problem with holding on to the snap last year, so I'll assume that won't be a continuing problem this year.  As for passing yardage, the numbers show it was a fairly rough day for everybody.  If he plays a game that's not in gale force winds (should happen at least a couple times--even in Kansas) the yardage should go up.  Even if the weather does continue to hinder long throws, that probably hurts the opponents more anyway.  The sacks are probably a little tougher to fix, but I've really got to believe that however much we don't want to watch them, he's even more interested in not participating.  I really think he'll put in the effort needed to make that happen.

In a more general sense though, I think the focus on passing statistics risks missing the forest for the trees.  The primary purpose of the K-State passing game is not to rack up yards or get scores itself, but to keep the defense honest so they can accomplish that with the running game.  With that in mind the true measure of the success of the passing game is not the passing statistics, but the rushing ones.  Kansas State ran for 313 yards Saturday.  So, either UCLA has one of the worst rushing defenses known to man, or the threat of passing did succeed in keeping the defense honest. 

Link to their post here.

They didn't consider Kansas State, but I can't really argue with the 7 teams they did pick.  (They may also have completely blanked on K-State's existence since they also left us off Kansas' win list.)  Just for my own amusement I put together KSU's profile in the same style for comparison and it seems to fall towards the bottom of the pile, but doesn't really look out of place.  (My RPI numbers are 3 days newer than theirs so there will be some discrepancies.)

Kansas State (21-4, 9-3) RPI: 6  SOS: 6

Top 25 RPI wins: #13 Texas A&M, at #15 Baylor, #19 Xavier, #25 Texas

Top 50 RPI wins: #37 Dayton (neutral court), at #43 UNLV

Losses: #1 Kansas, #29 Oklahoma State, at #39 Missouri, #60 Mississippi (neutral court)

Positives: 6-1 in true road games (5-1 in conference, 2-0 vs top 50 RPI), loss to Mississippi was early in the season, remaining schedule is solid, but except for Kansas should be wins, #6 in SOS, in #1 RPI conference, could really impress people with a win at Kansas

Negatives: loss to Mississippi and home loss to Oklahoma State hurt a bit, 2nd place in conference with little chance to get to first, 4 losses already and Kansas will probably provide a 5th

Remaining Schedule: at #46 Texas Tech, #39 Missouri, at #1 Kansas, #120 Iowa State

Verdict: ? 
I figure I'll leave that for everybody else to discuss.  It seems like the real wild card is, "Can they win the rematch with Kansas, and if not, how much of a handicap do they get for playing 2 games against the #1 team?"

Last week, inspired by one of the Big 12 Roundup questions, I took a shot at predicting how the Big 12 North will shake out.  I figured teams needed 5 wins to win the division and calculated how likely each team was to get there based on my estimates of their chances to win each remaining game.  Since I used probabilities for each remaining game, it's pretty easy to plug in each week's results and update the totals, and I didn't feel like letting all that effort go to waste.  At any rate here's this week's set of guesses on who wins this thing.

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