A conference, for those who don’t follow college sports, is
an association of teams, typically from the same region. The University of
Florida, my alma mater, is in the 14-team Southeastern Conference, known in
sports circles as the SEC.
The majority of a team’s games are against teams in its own
conference, and the remainder of the schedule is filled with nonconference
opponents. Florida, for example, plays a dozen regular-season football games a
year — eight against SEC teams and four against non-SEC teams.
Does all that make sense? Good. Now check out the college
football standings pictured below. They look good overall. The problem lies
left of overall.
Conf. is short for
conference, though in this case it’d
be more apropos if it were an abbreviated form of confusing or confounding.
A conference record is a portion of an overall record. A
team’s overall record is its conference record plus its nonconference record. (Conference
Record + Nonconference Record = Overall Record) The numbers on each side of the
overall win/loss ledger, therefore, must be equal to or greater than the numbers in the
conference and nonconference records. More specifically, if a team has one loss
overall, it can’t have two losses in conference. Impossible.
Not according to these standings.
If my alma mater is 5-1 overall and 3-2 against conference
opponents, that means Florida has two wins and negative one loss in three nonconference
games. That’s a broken record that must be fixed.
Florida has played six games this
season, four in conference and two out of conference. Florida is 5-1 overall
and 2-0 in nonconference games. So, to set the record straight, Florida is 3-1
in the SEC.
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