A wild and wacky week last week. One with ballot implications for sure
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My ballot. Computer poll.
A clear top 2 have emerged, and I find it really interesting that spots 3 through 12 are all quite close so that order is liable to shake up in these last few weeks. Keep in mind Notre Dame and USC have played an extra game so they are still artificially high.
Full ranking:
Rank Change Team Record Points 1 - Michigan 9-0 672 2 - Florida State 9-0 651 3 +3 Oregon 8-1 608 4 +1 Ohio State 9-0 591 5 -2 Notre Dame 7-3 587 6 -2 Texas 8-1 580 7 - Washington 9-0 577 8 - Oklahoma 7-2 562 9 +2 Penn State 8-1 561 10 +2 Alabama 8-1 548 11 -1 Georgia 9-0 547 12 -3 USC 7-3 542 13 +3 Louisville 8-1 514 14 -1 Kansas State 6-3 508 15 - Ole Miss 8-1 486 T16 +6 Tennessee 7-2 484 T16 - Texas A&M 5-4 484 18 +3 Arizona 6-3 478 19 - Oregon State 7-2 476 20 -6 North Carolina 7-2 472 21 -3 LSU 6-3 465 22 +2 Liberty 9-0 463 23 +16 Utah 7-2 459 24 -1 Duke 6-3 456 25 +8 Oklahoma State 7-2 454 26 +3 Kansas 7-2 452 27 -7 UCLA 6-3 451 28 -3 SMU 7-2 446 T29 +2 Iowa 7-2 444 T29 -3 Wisconsin 5-4 444 31 -1 Missouri 7-2 435 32 -4 Miami (FL) 6-3 433 33 +18 West Virginia 6-3 428 34 +15 Clemson 5-4 424 35 +1 Fresno State 8-1 423 36 +16 Kentucky 6-3 419 37 +1 Nebraska 5-4 418 38 +2 Texas Tech 4-5 414 39 -5 Rutgers 6-3 413 40 -13 Maryland 5-4 408 41 +20 Georgia Tech 5-4 407 T42 +12 JMU 9-0 405 T42 -7 Virginia Tech 4-5 405 T44 +3 UTSA 6-3 403 T44 -1 Florida 5-4 403 46 -9 Air Force 8-1 402 47 +11 Auburn 5-4 401 T48 -5 Jacksonville State 7-3 400 T48 -8 Colorado 4-5 400 50 -3 New Mexico State 7-3 398 51 -1 TCU 4-5 397 T52 +12 UNLV 7-2 396 T52 -6 Iowa State 5-4 396 54 -1 Minnesota 5-4 392 55 +1 Troy 7-2 389 T56 +1 Toledo 8-1 386 T56 -24 Miami (OH) 7-2 386 58 -15 South Alabama 4-5 385 59 +1 Arkansas 3-6 383 60 -1 Memphis 7-2 377 61 +7 NC State 6-3 374 62 +3 UCF 4-5 372 T63 -2 Tulane 8-1 370 T63 +6 Boston College 6-3 370 T63 - Washington State 4-5 370 66 +9 Illinois 4-5 360 67 +9 Texas State 6-3 359 T68 -28 Ohio 6-3 356 T68 +1 Coastal Carolina 6-3 356 T70 +10 Appalachian State 5-4 353 T70 +8 Wake Forest 4-5 353 72 -5 Northern Illinois 4-5 352 73 +14 Houston 4-5 345 T74 -8 Georgia Southern 6-3 342 T74 +11 Northwestern 4-5 342 76 -21 San Jose State 4-5 336 T77 -4 Louisiana 5-4 335 T77 +6 FAU 4-5 335 T77 -6 Purdue 2-7 335 80 -9 BYU 5-4 332 81 +11 South Carolina 3-6 331 82 +1 Rice 4-5 330 83 +4 Boise State 4-5 328 84 +11 Wyoming 6-3 326 85 -4 Mississippi State 4-5 324 86 +8 Syracuse 4-5 323 T87 +2 Old Dominion 4-5 321 T87 +25 Army 3-6 321 T89 -13 Georgia State 6-3 320 T89 -10 Louisiana Tech 3-7 320 T91 -2 Pittsburgh 2-7 318 T91 +7 Cincinnati 2-7 318 93 -12 Virginia 2-7 317 T94 +8 Western Kentucky 5-4 316 T94 +8 Utah State 4-5 316 96 -22 California 3-6 315 97 +1 Bowling Green 5-4 313 98 +9 Baylor 3-6 308 99 -2 Vanderbilt 2-8 306 100 - UNT 3-6 303 101 -5 Marshall 4-5 300 102 +3 UTEP 3-7 298 103 -3 Buffalo 3-6 297 104 -18 Eastern Michigan 4-5 292 T105 +5 Central Michigan 5-4 287 T105 -13 Arizona State 2-7 287 107 +8 Michigan State 3-6 286 108 +1 Colorado State 3-6 285 T109 -18 Western Michigan 3-6 284 T109 +7 Stanford 3-6 284 111 +6 Indiana 3-6 283 112 +7 Hawaii 3-7 277 T113 +9 Arkansas State 5-4 275 T113 - USF 4-5 275 T115 +5 Charlotte 3-6 271 T115 -13 Connecticut 1-8 271 T117 -1 San Diego State 3-6 265 T117 -9 Sam Houston 1-8 265 119 -13 FIU 4-5 263 120 - Middle Tennessee 2-7 261 121 +3 UAB 3-6 259 122 -12 Massachusetts 3-7 258 123 +3 Akron 2-7 252 124 +1 ECU 1-8 251 125 -2 Nevada 2-7 248 T126 -12 New Mexico 3-6 240 T126 +1 Navy 3-5 240 128 +1 Ball State 2-7 230 129 -1 UL Monroe 2-7 229 130 +1 Southern Mississippi 2-7 225 131 -1 Tulsa 3-6 221 132 - Temple 3-6 208 133 - Kent State 1-8 192 I feel like USC is way artificially high, even with the extra game. I think they’ve only lost big games and only won cupcakes?
I’d agree with that assessment. If I were doing it by eye, they’d definitely be lower. But one of my main objectives when I created the model was to reward teams that schedule tough opponents. USC has Notre Dame plus their 9 P5 conference foes and no FCS teams. (Ironically, the Notre Dame blowout loss is the game dragging them down the most.)
I found today’s poll super hard. My methodology is what it always is: look at the last week’s rankings, look at the results, and vibe my way through it.
The hardest part of this week was when I got to 20, realized I forgot about Oklahoma, and had to figure out the middle again.
I have very low confidence on my picks under the 10 or 11 slot, but based on this week’s results, so do the professional pollers too.
- Michigan
- Ohio State
- Washington
- Florida
- Georgia
- Oregon
- Penn State
- Texas
- Alabama
- Louisville
- Ole Miss
- Missouri
- Oklahoma
- Oregon State
- Utah
- Tennessee
- LSU
- Kansas
- Notre Dame
- Tulane
- USC
- Oklahoma State
- Clemson
- Arizona
- UCLA
I’m assuming #4 fLorida is actually #4 fsu?
Head/desk.
Yes.
Really curious about the rationale behind Mizzou at #12, given you’ve got LSU (who beat them) at #17 and aren’t ranking K-State or Kentucky. I hope it’s not because they just picked up a “quality loss” yesterday…
I would say it’s largely because I’m bad at this, and you’re probably right.
EDIT: I just noticed the Coaches Poll did something similar to me. Of course, the Coaches Poll is often bizarre.
LOL, no worries. There are AP voters that are more consistently bizarre (looking at you, Jon Wilner).
And actually, this made me curious since I hadn’t looked at their individual ballots in a while, and Wilner did the exact same thing but with Mizzou at 11…
This week’s poll. Computer resume-based ranking system:
- Ohio State | 9 - 0 | LW: 1 ( - )
- Washington | 9 - 0 | LW: 5 (+3)
- Florida State | 9 - 0 | LW: 2 (-1)
- Texas | 8 - 1 | LW: 4 ( - )
- Michigan | 9 - 0 | LW: 3 (-2)
- Alabama | 8 - 1 | LW: 7 (+1)
- James Madison | 9 - 0 | LW: 6 (-1)
- Georgia | 9 - 0 | LW: 11 (+3)
- Ole Miss | 8 - 1 | LW: 10 (+1)
- Penn State | 8 - 1 | LW: 12 (+2)
- Liberty | 9 - 0 | LW: 9 (-2)
- Louisville | 8 - 1 | LW: 14 (+2)
- Oregon | 8 - 1 | LW: 15 (+2)
- Oklahoma | 7 - 2 | LW: 8 (-6)
- Kansas | 7 - 2 | LW: 21 (+6)
- Iowa | 7 - 2 | LW: 19 (+3)
- Troy | 7 - 2 | LW: 24 (+7)
- Missouri | 7 - 2 | LW: 16 (-2)
- Utah | 7 - 2 | LW: 18 (-1)
- Oklahoma State | 7 - 2 | LW: 35 (+15)
- Tulane | 8 - 1 | LW: 20 (-1)
- Fresno State | 8 - 1 | LW: 29 (+7)
- LSU | 6 - 3 | LW: 23 ( - )
- Notre Dame | 7 - 3 | LW: 17 (-7)
- Toledo | 8 - 1 | LW: 28 (+3)
- Tennessee | 7 - 2 | LW: 27 (+1)
- Oregon State | 7 - 2 | LW: 30 (+3)
- USC | 7 - 3 | LW: 22 (-6)
- Kansas State | 6 - 3 | LW: 25 (-4)
- Duke | 6 - 3 | LW: 40 (+10)
- Memphis | 7 - 2 | LW: 38 (+7)
- Air Force | 8 - 1 | LW: 13 (-19)
- North Carolina | 7 - 2 | LW: 34 (+1)
- Rutgers | 6 - 3 | LW: 36 (+2)
- Arizona | 6 - 3 | LW: 47 (+12)
- UGA is starting to creep up with a big win over Mizzou. Next up they have a showdown with Ole Miss, followed by Tennessee. Both will be tough matchups.
- Michigan vs Penn State this week will help define who Ohio State’s big competition is atop the B1G. I really wanna see the chaos that would happen if Penn State pulls off the upset.
- Group of 5 intruders Liberty and James Madison both dropped this week despite winning. Their strength of schedule through the end of the season is pretty weak, so I expect that to keep happening some. However, if they win out I expect they will finish the regular season around the Top 15-ish position.
- Surprises this week: LSU didn’t move despite losing to Alabama, and Troy jumped a whopping 7 ranks after beating South Alabama. Troy’s movement is more due to what happened around them, plus they got a strength of schedule boost with former opponent Army taking down Air Force.
- This week’s biggest loser is the aforementioned Air Force, who fell 19 ranks from 13 down to 32 after being defeated by Army. This week’s biggest winner is Indiana who rose 26 ranks from 99 to 73 after beating Wisconsin.
I know I’m just petty, but I really miss alabama being ranked behind James Madison in this poll lol.
It’s so goofy that Georgia is still behind JMU in your poll. Do any rankings factor into your algorithm at all or is it just record+SOS?
Also, I didn’t notice this last week, but Troy is also kind of suspect here given they went head-to-head with K-State and lost handily. But I know computers are weird at times (mine seems to go the opposite way with the G5 teams).
Yeah it’s just a part of how my poll is set up. There can be some goofyness sometimes, but it usually works out by the end of the season.
I use the Pre-Season AP rankings as a starting point, purely to give the early weeks some kind of structure. Those rankings are applied as a diminishing factor from Week 0 through Week 6. After Week 6 my rankings are only based on W/L record and opponent’s rankings.
Through Week 10, Georgia has the weakest strength of schedule of all Power 5 teams, with their opponents ranking 82 on average. For comparison, the average ranking of JMU’s opponents is 74. So JMU’s wins are worth more at the moment. Those SOS rankings are re-calculated each week, so they’re going to change over the last weeks of the season. If UGA wins out, they’ll be fine.
This also explains the K-State/Troy discrepancy. Yes K-State beat Troy earlier in the season, but my spreadsheet doesn’t really care who you beat, it only cares about what your opponent is ranked and whether you won or lost. Teams don’t get a head-to-head boost against previous opponents.
I like this ranking system in part because it takes all the human emotion out of it. Teams are ranked only based on the results of their games and how strong their opponents are ranked, so their name or conference or my personal feelings of where they should be ranked don’t factor into it. It also looks at their entire body of work evenly, so early games aren’t weighted differently than late-season games, which is different from how AP and most human polls do it.
Of course, one of the obvious drawbacks of this system is highlighted by the UGA scenario: the best team in the country could be cursed with a bad schedule. For that I rely on the other eye test based polls in c/cfb to balance me out. I bring the robotic analysis, I’ll let others handle the vibes.
Thanks for the in-depth reasoning. As I mentioned in a previous week, I’m totally cool with this approach (and my poll also disregards head-to-head, but it is always an interesting argument against our power-rating-style computer polls).
Any plans to adjust the methodology with realignment kicking into high gear next year? I foresee lots of strong teams stuck playing each other, resulting in everyone picking up losses and looking worse on paper than in reality (as already happens with the PAC every year). I, for one, plan on restructuring my algorithm since it was designed based on the assumption that the 5 “power” conferences (+ND and BYU) were relatively equal.
Totally agree…we’ve chatted about this before, but a lot of the fun of voting in this poll for me is seeing how everyone does it differently. We’re trying to answer the question of who is the “best” team, but that word means something a little bit different to everybody.
Yeah I try to add improvements every year based on stuff I see during the season and I’ve been thinking of ways to re-tool it for next season, especially with the weirdness of realignment coming and some of the odd results I’ve gotten this season. I haven’t figured out exactly what I want to do yet, because I don’t want to add too much of my own biases into the formula. For example, I don’t want to give an artificial boost to teams just based on conference affiliations, because if we really do get an excellent team in a lower conference I don’t want my spreadsheet pushing them down just because of that. This season I’ve been running a few modified spreadsheets on the side just to play with, but I haven’t landed on anything I really like yet. Thankfully the offseason is long and I have plenty of data to tinker with to keep dialing it in.
I’m curious about yours, how much does it factor in stats throughout the season? I think you mentioned before that pre-season expectations are factored out at this point, do you keep it updated with performance stats every week?
It’s mostly just margin of victory/defeat. I’ve tinkered with adding more advanced stats, but then it feels like I’m geeking out too much and the tail is wagging the dog. At the end of the day, your team just needs to score more than the other team and if you can do that consistently, especially against good competition, you should be rewarded.
One criterion I really would like to tinker with is home field advantage. Right now it’s just a +4 point modifier for everyone, but there are definitely some environments where it’s worth more and some where it’s less. I haven’t found good public data on that (I’m sure all the bookies have that down pat though) so it’ll take a fair bit of statistical analysis to ascertain what those values are. Maybe next off-season.
Here’s mine. I still don’t feel like fsu deserves to be as high as they are in my 100% gut based poll, but my brain can’t provide a compelling enough argument to keep them lower. I’ve also got Tennessee top 10 again, definitely not caused by bias, no siree. This week will also see either Penn State or Michigan drop like a stone
- Michigan
- Washington
- Georgia
- Texas
- Florida State
- Oregon
- Ohio State
- Alabama
- Penn State
- Tennessee
- Ole Miss
- Notre Dame
- Utah
- LSU
- Louisville
- Missouri
- Iowa
- Liberty
- Oklahoma
- James Madison
- Duke
- Oregon State
- Kansas
- Tulane
- Oklahoma State
