DIAA Playoffs and Which Conference Might Be the Most Competitive
DIAA Playoffs and Which Conference Might Be the Most Competitive
Florida's DIAA conference is perhaps the most competitive DIAA conference in the country.
It has some competition. We actually charted this out based on the highest points difference per game down to the lowest. The Florida, the California (more about them later), and the MARC have the most gradual line from highest PDPG to the lowest.
There are other measurements, too. The best one, perhaps, is the number of close-loss bonus points. Florida had nine (and this isn't event counting a vacated result), which is a staggering 50% of games. MARC had 33% (which is really high), Liberty DIAA had 30%, SCRC had 25%, California had zero, as did the MAC and Southern DIAA. (HOA we had all sorts of trouble tracking results so we've left them out, but we know they aren't very high.)
Now, having a quarter or a third of you games close-loss bonus points is astonishing. It's really, really good. To have half your games be that close is even more astounding. These great BPL numbers show that teams are starting to find the right conferences, by the way. Anyway ... Florida is way ahead of everyone else.
So that brings us to this weekend, where Florida and the California DIAA conferences decide their top two. Those top two will advance to Houston to play-off with the Florida top two at the CRAA championship weekend.
Chico State is at Fresno State and Sacramento State hosts San Jose State.
Meanwhile Florida sees #1-seed Florida State host Florida International and Florida take on South Florida.
FSU got a bye to the semis and we asked Head Coach Michael Gomez about the benefit of getting a week off.
He said they didn't get much of an advantage.
"Dealt with thunderstorms the first two days of training this week so it was a little difficult to carry over any momentum that was built in the week prior," said Gomez. The extra time might have been an opportunity for injured players to come back, but that didn't happen.
What did happen, he said, was that because of injuries and unavailabilities 41 different players were used in recent week.
"The reserve grade guys weren't left behind in playoff preparation so they had to step up their skill level in order to participate, and they also served as the scout team so the standard had to be higher and they rose to the occasion," said Gomez.
