Conference bowl records mean nothing: A guide for the innumerate

A lot of stupid people who work for prominent publications are saying a lot of really stupid things these days. They are arguing that the Big Ten is a horrible terrible no-good conference because its teams went 4-6 in bowl games and that's terrible and "can't be spun." They are arguing that the SEC is the greatest conference since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE despite being 4-2 because shut up that's why and they're the ess-eee-see. Now we like our statistics here, and what we like better than our statistics is fundamentally sound analysis of our statistics. So we're going to do a fundamentally sound analysis of conference bowl game records, and let you all in on the secret: they're meaningless. The topic is statistics and probability, so I'm going have to be careful and longwinded because our language is not designed to discuss these topics briefly. For our first analysis, we're going to concentrate on the Big Ten. We're going to pr...