Introducing ... The MACtion Scale

As you'll see in today's Morning Tailgate Mailbag, someone proposed an excitement scale of sorts ... basically a way to look at the teams most likely to play exciting, ridiculous games. Here's how I discuss it in the mailbag

Not everybody actually enjoys offensive shootouts, but mid-week, high-scoring MAC games were a nice complement to the fact that the top two teams in the country (and a good portion of the SEC) were focused on suffocating, grueling defense. Points don't equal quality, but there's a certain excitement involved in shootouts, so let's create a scale. Along the lines of what M.M. suggested, we're going to need a mixture of high and low quality, using Passing Downs PPP ratings (raw passing downs explosiveness ratings, unadjusted for opponent) and Leverage Rates (the ratio of standard downs to total plays -- the higher the Leverage Rate, the fewer passing downs you are facing). The trick here, is that pure, MACtion-worthy football requires a mixture of good and bad football. On offense, you have to be able to continuously dig yourself out of holes on passing downs and unable to avoid passing downs. On defense, it's the opposite -- you should be able to force passing downs and continuously let teams off the hook.

After some more thought, I might revisit this idea -- it could be used as another aspect of a team's "personality" (along with things like pace, run-pass ratios and Covariance -- but for use in the mailbag, I'm using Study Hall to post the entire list. Below, you'll see teams given points based on their Passing Downs PPP ratings (offense and defense) and leverage rates (offense and defense). The points from the four columns don't directly add up to the TOTAL column simply because "good" in two of the categories is "bad" in terms of MACtion. (Actual MAC teams in bold)

This probably does need tweaking -- any MACtion list without Toledo in its Top 25 isn't quite right -- but it's a start.

Full (tentative) list after the jump. It's probably worth noting that No. 1 Vandy and No. 26 Cincinnati are playing each other in the Liberty Bowl in a few weeks.