SouthernAggie
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Several months ago, I read the UNC message boards extensively when the realignment talk was hot. The fans on those boards were overwhelmingly in favor of the SEC over the Big Ten. Personally, I'd love to see UNC and either of the Virginia teams added to the SEC and then have the SEC shut the doors. The Big Ten can have Duke and the other Virginia team.
I actually thought Vanderbilt's bowl turnout was pretty impressive last season in the context of how poorly bowls were attended nationwide and probably was among the top few in the SEC bowls. Off the top of my head, Florida and Mississippi State had embarrassingly bad fan representation. Florida's reputation prevents that from mattering for them moving forward, but I bet the folks at the Gator Bowl came out of bowl season wishing they had invited the better team rather than the "better" fan base.
I can be a smart aleck, but I'm far from dimwitted. If your purpose was simply to point out which teams you think are the strongest or something along those lines, then your readers can take those percentages and use them to make a rough ranking of the teams, or at least of those who are still undefeated. You're just wrong about what the technical meaning of percentages, though, and they were a poorly chosen and/or executed tool in this instance. They also have nothing to do with betting odds, which cannot be converted to percentages and primarily serve the purpose of balancing the wagers on either side of a particular bet.
I have read this site almost daily for probably close to two years. The coverage is great, and the articles are generally well written. Stylistically, there are only two things I've noticed regularly that could be improved.
1. This site has at times been a little too quick to pat itself on the back, repeatedly claiming to be the first to have made some prediction or to have reported on some development. You provide great coverage, and your regular readers know that. Let us be the ones to give you credit where it is due. When you do it yourself, it can at times be a little off-putting.
2. You are sometimes overly defensive in the comments section. People will disagree with you at times, and at times you will even be wrong. I like to think a Southern audience would be more attracted to consistent class (which your writing usually shows) rather than the Jim Rome-esque shock jock that sometimes shows up in the comments.
Overall, this is a great site, and I have no intention of stopping reading it. I don't mind the occasional "error" in writing, as everyone makes them. I probably just have too much time on my hands today since the wife and kids are visiting family, so I couldn't let it slide when a self-professed educator tried to take the high ground and insult your readers' intelligence based on a flawed premise.
As an American, I hope you're not a math teacher. The percentages he assigned are mathematically impossible, and Alabama and Arkansas provide the clear example. Since they play each other, their percentages are not independent of each other. Their percentages should add up to less than 100%, to account for the possibility they could lose to another opponent. So, if you think Arkansas has a 30% chance of beating Alabama, then Arkansas would have a <30% chance of being remaining undefeated and Alabama would have a <70% chance.
I doubt it'd happen, but they could get creative and work out a rotation where one bowl would get the SEC-Big 12 matchup and the other bowl would get a national semifinal game, and they'd swap back and forth each year.
That's a worthwhile point about taking it slow, but the move to the SEC isn't the only factor here. The demand for tickets is also increasing naturally because A&M has a huge alumni base that is probably the fastest growing in the SEC and possibly the country. A&M and Florida have enrollments that dwarf all other SEC universities. According to the numbers on the Wikipedia SEC page, A&M has more students than UT and Auburn combined, for example. Also, A&M is only a couple generations removed from being an all-male, all-military school, at which time it had under 10,000 students. So, every new alumni class is not only bigger than those of most other schools in the U.S., it's also replacing the much smaller classes that are dying off. When that natural decrease in demand is combined with the increased demand for visiting SEC fan bases, it makes a lot of sense to explore the options for expansion.