If all I have to do to get Cal to be #9 in the country is punch Kerry Wood, then I’ll do it!

Jon WIlmer thinks this all just much ado about nothing again, pointing out that Cal has never finished above their AP pre-season rankings.

Actually, Wilner said this:

The Bears do not always respond well to pressure and are more likely to underachieve than overachieve — not since 2004 have they finished the season ranked higher in the AP poll than where they started.

(emphasis added).

Which I point out just to say this: Wilner already writes dumb things when quoted accurately, it’s just not fair to make him sound even dumber by misquoting him.

Seriously, Wilner’s criticism is meaningless. Saying “it hasn’t happened since 2004” makes it seem like a long time—holy shit, Bush was still president then, nobody had iPhones, Calfan had only graduated a year ago!—but really, that’s just four seasons. He chose 2004 as the cutoff date just because it’s the last time we finished better than our preseason ranking—i.e., because that’s the data that best supports his conclusion, rather than the reverse. A more logical analysis would use some sort of objective data tranches, like by decade or by coach. Regardless, in two of those four seasons, we missed our preseason ranking by 6 and 5 spots—pretty small margins, especially when it was preseason #19 and final #25. But where Wilner really strays into gibberish is when he says this:

Much more noteworthy is the lack of an upside surprise, especially when you compare Cal to the other top programs in the Pac-10.
…
But during the four-season stretch (2005-08) in which Cal has repeatedly failed to produce a better-than-expected year, four other Pac-10 programs have pulled surprises to the upside

The four teams that finished higher than their preseason rankings were UCLA, Oregon (twice), OSU (twice), and ASU. When you’re looking at nine teams (he drops USC from the analysis) over four seasons, that means 6 out of 36 teams in the Pac 10 beat expectations. Cal isn’t one of them—but is that significant? Wilner’s own data show that teams rarely finish better than expected, so it’s not as though Cal failed to achieve some easy or important goal.

If Wilner really wants to test his hypothesis—implicitly, “Cal’s high 2009 preseason ranking should not be trusted”—he needs to show that (1) Cal fails to meet expectations more often than other teams (preferably similarly situated teams); (2) Cal exceeds expectations less often than other teams; (3) the same factors that caused Cal to not meet/exceed expectations in the past are still relevant this season (e.g., if Tedford is possibly a factor, look at the whole Tedford era, not just part of it; e.g., if the number of nationally televised games is a factor, compare the past and current TV schedules). Obviously, Wilner doesn’t do any of that.

Thanks for posting this, Slims.

Wow, #9 in the nation. I think he’s making some big assumptions that our offense will really come around this year.

Steele’s preseason rankings at least make more sense than “OMG JAHVID BEST RANK CAL”.