Introduction to the Hollow

Welcome dear reader to the first installment at Odrick's Hollow. I hope to keep the esoterrorism to the levels expected of a blog with such a title, but lord knows that'll be a difficult task when confining myself to the college gridiron. I'm no Chris Berman spoutin' incomprehensible nicknames at every other turn. In any case, I'd like to use this little corner of the web to ramble on with little to no readership.
To give an example of the analysis I hope to feature, here is some work on Out of Conference play from last year's regular season.


This analysis utilized conference vs conference records so I wasn't able resolve to a level such as winning pct of bcs conference opponents, but I can't imagine that should make a huge difference on the conclusions here. The conferences are sorted by their winning percentages against the Big 6 conferences (ACC, BEAST, B10, B12, PAC10, SEC) and as you can see only the ACC and MWC had winning records vs BCS conference opponents. Before going and claiming such records could be due to playing few opponents, you can see that 52% of the ACC's 48 OOC games were against BCS opponents as were 41% of the MWC's 36 OOC games. As stated this fails to take into account whether a conference only plays other conference's dregs but this should come out in the wash in comparing conferences.
Bowl season came and showed the flaws in such broad analysis with the Pac 10 going 5-0 while having a poor showing in this analysis. Likewise the ACC underperformed in their bowls. But as I hope to address later in this blog, conference bowl tie-ins are very poor at matching up equally slotted teams in conferences and gives general systemic advantages. Let's see where we go from here.