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Publication Date: December 9, 2003
Nostalgia's Not What It Used to Be
Last week you got to watch one of my core beliefs take a beating, although I still think there's hope that I'll find a better way to study the effects of overuse on pitcher effectiveness. It turns out that's the second time this month that one of my long-held beliefs has taken a beating, though, and the other one's not going to survive.
I started doing the ISR's and RPI's during the 1998 season, since that was the first time I had access to a full set of scores for the season. Before that, I had been following the game on a national basis for a few years with increasing passion, but I was still using a good bit of personal bias in forming my opinions. This culminated with the 1997 season, where I had an up-close-and-personal view of what I was convinced were the best teams in the country -- the SEC sent four teams to Omaha, including the two finalists, and I followed them closely all year. And I was absolutely convinced that the wrong team won the national championship. I was quite sure that Alabama was better than LSU that year. It wasn't an unbelievable opinion; LSU won the SEC regular season, but Alabama beat them two of three in the regular season, won the SEC tournament (which I considered much more seriously back then), and had finished much stronger overall than LSU.
Over the last month, though, I've been reconstructing a score set for the 1997 season, and I'm ready to publish it. I'm missing 46 games (which means that I have 99.3% of all games involving Division I teams for that year) involving 10 teams, and I'm fairly sure that all of those games were against non-Division I teams, so I can do full ratings and be comfortable with them. Scores and standings are available now in The Filing Cabinet, and ISR's and RPI's are in their appropriate places. Thanks for this go to Rick Rollins and Craig Gowens, who contributed the largest bits of information.
And, darn it all, LSU was the best team in the country that year; they pulled into first early in March and never looked back. This was probably the most dominant national champion of the seven years that I now have records for, as no one else has led the ISR's for that length of time and won the CWS. So much for that belief, but it's one that I'm glad to have the information to put to rest.
So, what else went on that year? New Hampshire played their last year and dropped the sport. A newcomer on the national scene, tiny little Rice University, made it to Omaha, but they were regarded as a one-year fluke, since there was no way they could sustain that level of quality. It was, to a large extent, the last gasp (as far as I can tell without going back further -- it could just be that it was a one-year thing) of the two-superconference system. There were three teams from both the SEC and the Pac 10 in the top 10, with a fourth SEC team winning its home regional. Here are the ISR top 25:
All D1
Rank Team W L W L Rating
1 Louisiana State 55 13 57 13 129.4
2 Alabama 54 14 56 14 127.4
3 Stanford 43 20 45 20 124.8
4 Auburn 49 17 50 17 122.8
5 Miami, Florida 49 18 51 18 122.7
6 UCLA 43 21 45 21 122.6
7 Southern California 40 20 42 20 122.6
8 Florida State 48 17 50 17 121.6
9 Arizona State 38 22 39 22 120.8
10 Florida 40 24 40 24 120.8
11 Mississippi State 44 21 47 21 120.7
12 Tennessee 40 19 42 19 120.7
13 Georgia Tech 46 15 46 15 120.1
14 Rice 47 16 47 16 120.1
15 South Alabama 43 19 43 19 119.7
16 Texas Tech 36 14 46 14 119.6
17 Cal State Fullerton 39 24 39 24 118.9
18 Louisiana-Lafayette 38 17 43 18 118.2
19 Oklahoma State 42 19 46 19 118.1
20 Long Beach State 38 26 39 26 117.6
21 Santa Clara 41 19 41 20 117.0
22 Oklahoma 34 19 39 20 117.0
23 Nevada 37 21 39 21 116.8
24 Texas A&M 39 22 39 22 116.8
25 Arkansas 31 20 36 20 116.6
This was one of the last years of the 48-team tournament, and the selection's from that year bear some rather in-depth scrutiny, both on their own and in comparison with the 2003 season, so I'm going to leave that as a full topic for later.
This was a good bit of work, but I very much enjoyed it. I hope you'll take some time to poke through the standings to either trigger some memories if you've been a fan for a while or see what you missed if you haven't been. I think, given the resources that I have available, that I can go back with reasonable completeness at least a few more years, so I'll do that as time allows.
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| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> A Blast from the Not-So-Distant Past | About the author, Boyd Nation |