Rivalry Week and Bowl Ramifications
I thought Mississippi St. would win. People will say they didn’t deserve it because of the stupid celebration penalty, but Ole Miss didn’t deserve to get a first and goal from a phantom pass interference call.
Mississippi St. is going to a bowl game for a 10th consecutive year for the first time, but they don’t mention that they made it one year without a winning record because there weren’t enough bowl-eligible teams by virtue of six wins (but you can’t have 7 losses, and at least five of the wins have to be over FBS opponents).
Congrats to Virginia for finally beating Virginia Tech. In the short term, that probably means a loss to Clemson, but that could also come with an Orange Bowl berth.
I’m somewhat shocked that TCU lost its chance at bowl eligibility in a home game against West Virginia. I guess they get up for the good teams and not so much for some of the others.
The combination of the TCU loss and the Missouri bowl ban being upheld apparently gives more room for G5 conferences. An Ole Miss win would have made yet another spot available. I don’t believe it will be necessary to make other teams eligible this year.
SEC Bowl Projections
If Missouri had been eligible, there would have been 10 SEC bowl teams. As it stands, the Independence, Birmingham, and one other bowl (possibly the Belk) will have to do without SEC teams.
It’s expected Georgia and Alabama will be in NY6 bowls. It’s possible Georgia could be in the Playoff along with LSU. The mostly likely candidate for the Citrus will be Florida. Cue the clips of Steve Spurrier mocking Tennessee for being in that game. Auburn would probably be good for the Outback. The Outback is officially even with the other bowls (apart from Independence and Birmingham), but it seems like in most years it gets the team that just barely misses the Citrus. Auburn has better wins but one more loss, including a loss to Florida.
Texas A&M would make the most sense for the Texas Bowl, and Tennessee would make the most sense for the Music City Bowl since they can make pretty easy respective bus rides. The Liberty Bowl (in Memphis) also might make a play for Tennessee. Kentucky will probably get whichever Tennessee bowl is left over. That would leave Mississippi St. for the Gator Bowl. I don’t see any cause for upset or massive controversy with any of those.
One more of those bowls mentioned in the last paragraph would be without an SEC team if a third SEC team ends up in a non-playoff NY6 bowl.
LSU-Texas A&M Game and Series
Speaking of the SEC, I’ve updated the blog for the LSU-Texas A&M Series. That series of blogs is written as neutrally as I can, but I’m going to have to break objectivity for the moment. I watched the game until the end hoping for more points by LSU’s second-team offense, but I don’t know if LSU will ever break the series margin of victory record that the Aggies set in 1914 (54 points). On the show Off the Bench, someone asked what final score it would take to get the bad taste out of ones mouth from last year. I said 75-0, but 50-7 will have to do.
I go into more detail in the blog of course, but I also wanted to mention it was LSU’s largest margin of victory in series history, which had been 37 (in 1971, Gene Stallings’ last season). That win had also followed a two-point upset loss in the previous year that ended a significant LSU unbeaten streak in the series (10 in that case; it had been 7 going into last year’s game).
Playoff Competition
In the top 25, Memphis and Cincinnati essentially switched places. The Tigers will have to beat Cincinnati again to win the American Conference.
I said that Oklahoma, Baylor, and Utah (the three possible one-loss major-conference teams) would move up relative to other teams, and two of the three (Oklahoma and Utah) passed up Notre Dame on the strength of their wins Saturday. None of them passed up Boise St., but those same two are a fraction of a point away from doing so. Oregon, Baylor, and Oklahoma would all count for more than Hawaii, whom Boise will be playing in the Mountain West championship game.
It would be tough to pass up Memphis if the Tigers win their championship game, but I honestly don’t see why Memphis shouldn’t be in the conversation other than the fact that the committee doesn’t like G5 teams.
The American right now isn’t really inferior to how the Big East used to be. In 2007, West Virginia would have played for a national championship had they not lost to a losing Pittsburgh team for the second loss on the final week. Virginia Tech did play Florida St. for the national title in 1999. In 2009, the top four of the final BCS standings included Cincinnati of the Big East and TCU of the Mountain West.
In those years, you had to be in the top two. So it’s not far-fetched that a team like Memphis could be in the top four when you’re going to have a winner of a conference with only a couple of ranked teams and a weak non-conference schedule as competition. I know the programs are mostly different now, but I think Memphis, SMU, Cincinnati, and Navy are better than West Virginia, Rutgers, and Louisville right now.
I also think it’s harder to go undefeated against Cincinnati, SMU, and Navy than it is to go undefeated against Baylor and whatever teams tied for third in the Big XII you want to pick to compare. The most direct point of comparison is that SMU beat TCU, who took Baylor to overtime and gave Oklahoma a scare before the referees bailed out the Sooners.
As for Utah, if they beat Oregon, that will be the only top-25 win. Second- and third-best wins would be BYU and Washington, who have 5 losses apiece. There is no reason to think the better American teams wouldn’t have a good chance against those two either. So even if I grant that Cincinnati is a lesser opponent than Baylor or Oregon (and I’m not convinced they are), I think we need to look past the best team you beat. South Carolina has the best win in college football this season (whether you ask me or the committee), but they didn’t even have a mildly successful season.
As for overall strength of schedule, I have Memphis 63rd, Utah 76th, Oklahoma 89th, and Baylor 105th. That is only an average of the FBS opponents, but I don’t think it’s very important to talk about who had the best FCS opponent (it was probably Memphis anyway since Southern beat Grambling to qualify for the SWAC championship game, and none of the others had successful conference campaigns).
Anyway, the point of all this is if Memphis comes out ahead of one of these conference champions, I don’t think that’s an indictment of my system. Just like it wasn’t an indictment of (what I now call) my unweighted system in 2009 when I agreed with the BCS about Cincinnati being #3. We just have a committee now that uses “the eye test” (which I think is mostly a prestige test in reality) instead. The point of computer ratings (at least for me) is to take out that kind of bias.
The loser of either (or both) the Big Ten or SEC championship could be ahead of the winners of the Big XII, Pac-12, and American conferences for that fourth spot here (and possibly with the committee) anyway.
Conference Comparisons
As far as conference strength, the SEC almost caught up with the Big Ten in best average team. I thought they would improve by going at least 3-1 against the ACC on the final weekend, but I wasn’t sure if they could overtake the Big Ten. The Big Ten also has a slight edge in top 25 teams on my list, 6 to 5.
One area where the SEC is better is against other Power 5 opponents. The SEC is 9-6 in such games, and the Big Ten is 5-5. So playing 50% more opponents in that category with the same number of teams says something for the SEC. On the other hand, the SEC has played a lot more FCS opponents, so I guess it balances out somewhat. The SEC has also played four games against potential champions of the six best conferences (A&M and South Carolina lost to Clemson, Ole Miss lost to Memphis, and Auburn beat Oregon), while the Big Ten has only played one (Ohio St. beat Cincinnati).
Top 25
| rank | team | last |
| 1 | Ohio St. | 1 |
| 2 | LSU | 2 |
| 3 | Clemson | 3 |
| 4 | Georgia | 4 |
| 5 | Memphis | 13 |
| 6 | Wisconsin | 14 |
| 7 | Boise St. | 8 |
| 8 | Oklahoma | 12 |
| 9 | Utah | 10 |
| 10 | Notre Dame | 6 |
| 11 | Baylor | 11 |
| 12 | Penn St. | 7 |
| 13 | Florida | 18 |
| 14 | Cincinnati | 5 |
| 15 | Michigan | 9 |
| 16 | Oregon | 17 |
| 17 | Appalachian | 19 |
| 18 | Auburn | 22 |
| 19 | Alabama | 16 |
| 20 | SMU | 21 |
| 21 | Minnesota | 15 |
| 22 | Air Force | 24 |
| 23 | Navy | 23 |
| 24 | Iowa | 20 |
| 25 | UL-Lafayette | — |
Out of top 25: (25) USC
The Bayou Blogger 
Alabama, Appalachain St., Auburn, Baylor, Cincinnati, College Football, College Football Playoff, Floirda, Georgia, LSU, Memphis, Notre Dame, Ohio St., Oklahoma, Penn St., SEC, Wisconsin
Pre-Bowl Top 25 and Playoffs
In Bowls, College Football, College Football Playoff, Post-game, Rankings, Rankings Commentary on December 8, 2019 at 7:20 PMTop Teams and Conferences
If you look at my ratings site, the ratings look a bit different. I noticed that the unweighted ratings were included multiple times in the weighted ratings, so previously it wasn’t really an average of the two systems. Without counting the unweighted system four extra times, it wasn’t as necessary to produce such large numbers to create an average.
Before I get to the resumes and arguments, I did update the LSU-Georgia series blog. It’s funny how the series is almost a perfectly even split in both Athens and Baton Rouge, but LSU has a 4-1 lead in Atlanta now.
I thought it was appropriate that LSU came out first given where the Tigers’ best wins are ranked. LSU beat #7 Georgia, #14 Florida, #15 Auburn, and #17 Alabama. Ohio St. beat #12 Penn St., #18 Cincinnati, #21 Wisconsin twice, #23 Michigan, and #25 Florida Atlantic. So only one win was better than Alabama, LSU’s fourth-best win in hindsight.
Utah St., Texas A&M, and Texas make seven top-50 wins for LSU; and Indiana makes seven top-50 wins for Ohio St., so it makes sense that the two teams ended up so close. Georgia Southern, another LSU win, is just outside of the top 50 at #52.
This doesn’t factor into my ratings directly; but for the sake of argument, I think it’s also noteworthy that Florida, Auburn, and Alabama only look worse because of subsequent losses to other teams LSU beat or would beat (Florida to Georgia, Auburn to Georgia, and Alabama to Auburn).
For Playoff purposes, I think it’s also important that LSU was the first team to beat Texas (which they did on the road), the first team to beat Florida, and the first team to beat Alabama (which they also did on the road). I know Texas isn’t a great team now, but entering the season with a quarterback who knows what he’s doing and with most of the team that had just won the Sugar Bowl made Texas a very good team relative to others in September. They didn’t do much with that from that point forward, whereas someone like Florida Atlantic is probably a much better team now than they were.
I know Ohio St. has a couple more top-25 wins, but as the teams get lower in the top 25 they don’t count as much. The cumulative victories are still enough for the Buckeyes to be a clear #1 in the unweighted system. The weighted system is triggered by certain targets that aren’t necessarily the same as the final top 10 or top 25, and LSU won that.
It so happened that LSU got to play the other five best teams in the SEC (the teams I mentioned and Texas A&M, who only lost to the higher-ranked SEC teams, all of whom LSU beat, and Clemson). Ohio St. did not get to play Iowa or Minnesota, who were two of the three best teams in the other division. If they had, there would have been no way for LSU to be ahead in my ratings, especially given that Cincinnati and Florida Atlantic turned out to be better on paper than LSU’s non-conference opponents. I don’t think either would have beaten Texas, but they have better resumes.
These wins explain LSU and Ohio St. being so far ahead of anyone else. Clemson didn’t beat anyone in the top 30, and Oklahoma only beat a single top 30 team (which they did narrowly twice).
Speaking of Oklahoma, they were not able to pass up Memphis. I thought Cincinnati had to win for the Sooners to be #4. That doesn’t bother me though. Let’s look at the best wins. For Oklahoma: #11 Baylor twice, #33 Oklahoma St., #42 Iowa St. (by one point), and #43 Texas. For Memphis: #18 Cincinnati twice, #19 Navy, and #22 SMU.
Similar to Ohio St./LSU, Oklahoma has more quantity; but the quality isn’t as good. Two wins against the top 30 versus four. You have to go into the 60s for Memphis’s next win (Tulane), but I think there needs to be more focus on success versus the top teams. I didn’t even mention how Memphis got screwed out of a chance to beat #34 Temple. Even if it were a fair result, the Owls weren’t much worse than Oklahoma’s loss (#30 Kansas St.).
Clemson’s average win was worse than Oklahoma’s or Memphis’s average win, but Clemson got more credit for their wins because they had one more than Oklahoma or Memphis had. So they would have been #3 even if Memphis and Oklahoma had taken extra bye weeks instead of losing. If a team like Auburn or Florida had finished with one loss, they probably would have been #3 instead; but the schedules of the one-loss teams just weren’t strong enough to challenge for that third spot.
I’ll talk more about non-Power 5 teams at the end.
There were a few odd side effects of recalculating the averages such as the improvements in Minnesota’s and Appalachian St.’s rankings. I had Minnesota right ahead of Alabama going into rivalry week, which went poorly for both, so there wasn’t a great reason to put Alabama ahead in the first place. I’ll also discuss Appalachian St. in the section at the end.
Michigan and Wisconsin went down a good bit, even more than Wisconsin’s loss would have normally dictated. On the other hand, the Badgers went up the rankings dramatically fast after beating Minnesota. I think the most important aspect of the shuffling of the Big Ten teams is Penn St., who counts as a really quality win for the Gophers. Michigan couldn’t beat the Nittany Lions, and Wisconsin didn’t play them. There is sort of a preliminary rating I give each team, and Penn St. basically shows up as a top-ten team there. That’s important to the weighted ratings, which now have a bigger impact on the overall average. Also, in Wisconsin’s case, it’s easier to fall below teams when you lose and they either won or didn’t have to play anyone. The middle of the top 25 is always more crowded as well.
Auburn ended up passing Florida, but I’m OK with that. A team from their division won the SEC, and a team they beat out of conference won the Pac-12. Combine that with the fact that they had to play Alabama and Texas A&M (both of whom they beat) when Florida played easier opponents (such as Tennessee and Kentucky), I think it overcomes the fact that the Gators finished the game better at home against Auburn.
That said, Auburn and Florida were close enough that I can understand making a judgment call based on head to head. But if you’re going to do that to resolve Auburn vs. Florida, you need to follow the same logic when it comes to Auburn vs. Alabama. The Citrus Bowl is supposed to go to the best available SEC team, which was Auburn. Auburn should not be penalized for having to play Florida and Georgia. Auburn and Alabama both lost to LSU, they both beat the other mutual opponents, Auburn beat Alabama, and Auburn also beat Oregon. Also, if it were Alabama, they would be rewarding the team who finished stronger.
Degrading Teams from Outside the Major Conferences
It really bothers me how 12 years ago fans blindly accepted a #10 rank for a team like Hawaii, who played absolutely no one of consequence. Their main claim to fame was a last-minute win over a Pac-10 team with a losing record. Previous teams like Tulane (21 years ago) had been even higher when they were undefeated. 1984 was before my time (I was alive but not watching football), but BYU’s big bowl win was over a 5-loss Big Ten team, and they finished #1 in both polls.
I wasn’t in favor of any of those being so highly regarded, but you can go to the opposite extreme as well. Now we have this fancy committee, who I think exists for the purpose of excluding non-Power-5 teams, and fans (and even voters) just accept that no other team is even in the top 15 no matter what they do because the committee tells them so. The first year of the committee was 2014. Marshall was unranked that year by the committee despite reaching #18 in the polls after starting 10-0 (and playing a much worse schedule than Group-of-5 teams who are ranked in the middle of the top-25 at best now). It seems that since then the polls have learned to be more cautious about “outsider” teams. The TV usually uses the committee rankings, so I think the pollsters generally just know what the number next to the team on the digital scoreboard was.
I know the BCS never put a non-Power-5 team like that in the top 2, but they put them in the top 4 multiple times. (Given their schedule and history, Notre Dame is basically Power 5 although they don’t technically play in a conference.) Ten years ago, for instance, the BCS had three teams from outside of the Power 5 in the top six of the standings (Cincinnati, TCU, and Boise St.). TCU even returned to the top 4 the next season. Hold your breath for the Playoff committee to ever do that.
Boise St. even came close to Oklahoma this year. The Broncos had five wins over the top 41 to Oklahoma’s three. If they had played one additional good team from the other division (they avoided San Diego St.), they would have been ahead as well. Maybe the Mountain West should just kick out New Mexico and UNLV (which would have given them almost the same average as the Big XII) and play a schedule like the Big XII does. If they had, Boise St. would have gotten to play Air Force again.
That’s not to say Oklahoma isn’t capable of winning the championship, but there should be consequences for not scheduling decent opponents and even most of the good teams you beat not scheduling decent opponents out of conference. The Sooners’ best non-conference opponent was Houston, which finished with a losing record playing in Memphis’s division. Baylor’s best non-conference opponent was Texas-San Antonio, #114 of 130 teams. Oklahoma St. also didn’t play anyone out of conference who finished with a winning record. Tulsa also played in Memphis’s division unsuccessfully Oregon St. had a better season than expected, but I only have the Beavers #85. Houston and Tulsa were in the 90s, between UTSA and Oregon St. Some other Big XII teams scheduled all right, but I’m not sure it helps to say “At least the team we lost to beat 6-6 Mississippi St.!” It’s not worth bragging about at all to beat a team who lost to Iowa or who lost to LSU.
Appalachian St. only had one loss, and six wins against the top 70 isn’t bad given their conference. They’re a much more credible member of the top 10 than that Hawaii team I mentioned , for instance. I did think it was right for them to be behind Notre Dame, who only played a few teams who weren’t in the top 70. Boston College was actually the Irish’s eighth-best win at #71, but you get the idea. The Mountaineers scheduled well out of conference, but they still didn’t get as high-quality of a win as Navy. Their loss (to Georgia Southern) was not as forgivable as Michigan or Georgia. Given Baylor’s struggles against non-bowl teams, losses to the only top-30 team they played, and lack of any serious attempt to schedule anyone out of conference, I don’t mind Appalachian St. being ahead of the Bears.
Top 25
Out of top 25: (25) UL-Lafayette