Week 12 Top 25 and CFP Notes 2023

Ratings and College Football Playoff Response/Prediction

The first four teams are all undefeated now, just in time to lose at least one undefeated team this weekend.  It happens to be the same top four as the CFP top 25.  I can argue until I’m blue in the face about Oregon, but I guess people like flashy offenses and uniforms (not to mention years of a hype and a nationwide ad campaign for the quarterback) more than they like a good strength of schedule.  It seems like they’re setting up the possibility of Oregon going to the Playoff in the event of revenge wins over Oregon St. (for last year) and Washington (for both last year and earlier this season).

Putting aside the CFP ramifications, I think Oregon might have some motivation to win this next game.

I don’t think Washington, Georgia, or Florida St. (another undefeated not in the top four) have much chance of a loss this coming weekend, but losses by none of them (except maybe Georgia) would be much stranger than the time 4-7 Pitt beat 10-1 West Virginia in 2007 to help LSU make the championship game. 

Florida and Washington St. have five wins apiece and are playing for bowl eligibility as well as in-state bragging rights, while Georgia Tech is already bowl-eligible.  A late pick-six is likely the only reason Washington beat Arizona St., who is only 3-8.  Despite one fewer win, Florida is a better team than Boston College, whom Florida St. only beat by 2.  Georgia hasn’t really come close to a loss though.

Alabama and Florida St. both lost ground compared to higher teams as a result of playing FCS opponents.  Alabama probably lost a bit less since the SEC gained strength with out-of-conference wins and because Chattanooga is an FCS playoff team.

I suspect that unless Washington and Georgia remain undefeated, removing Oregon and Alabama from the running in the process, the plan is that Florida St. will be excluded from the Playoff.  I don’t know if this was the plan before their QB Jordan Travis was hurt or not.

I don’t think the CFP standings after Alabama matter too much for the national championship, but LSU fans (ironically) should cheer for Missouri and Ole Miss to lose for a better chance at a selection committee (or NY6) bowl or at the CapitalOne Bowl.  It’s ironic because normally it would be a good thing if no one outside of the top 12 beat you and you had a top-10 win, but that’s not how the logic of bowl placement works.

It would be more logical for LSU fans to cheer for Alabama to beat Georgia (whom LSU did not play, if you haven’t noticed) in the SEC Championship game because that would retain the possibility of there being two SEC playoff teams.  This might not be the year for that to happen though given the possibility of four undefeated teams going into championship weekend.  There are also a couple of other teams (I mentioned Oregon; there is also Texas) who could be good one-loss candidates as conference champions.  I think one-loss Texas will go ahead of one-loss Alabama even if they shouldn’t.

Anyway, the rest of this is just about my ratings, not the CFP rankings or what I think they will do.

The Big Ten is now much closer to the Pac-12, which is now #3, as they can look forward to taking the Pac-12’s two best teams (as well as UCLA and USC, which are more in the middle).  They would still be behind the SEC, which will add the Big XII’s two best teams.

I mentioned Arizona St. earlier.  Oregon’s win over the Sun Devils allowed them to get past Ole Miss, who beat an inferior UL-Monroe squad.  Other relatively small differences in quality of opponents accounted for the movement in the rest of the top 20, apart from James Madison, who lost to Appalachian St.  Oregon St. fell a smaller number of spots for losing to Washington, which was a close game as expected.

I had a little bit of trouble figuring out the last two.  I strongly considered Oklahoma St. and Clemson, but they each had three losses that were all big negatives.  Arizona had only one bad loss and one that was mediocre.  Oregon St. and North Carolina St. only had one mediocre-to-bad loss apiece.  Oklahoma St. had the best list of wins, but the others had comparable good wins.  I didn’t hold the fourth loss (to Florida St.) against Clemson, but there weren’t really strong wins to counterbalance the other losses.

It might seem a little weird that North Carolina still has honorable mention status, but the four teams directly below them (Kansas, Utah, Tennessee, and USC) all lost also. Another interesting one is UNLV, whom I have never ranked in the top 25.

My Top 25

Rank	Team	Last
1	Ohio St.	1
2	Washington	2
3	Georgia	5
4	Michigan	4
5	Texas	6
6	Alabama	7
7	Florida St.	3
8	Penn St.	8
9	Oregon	10
10	Ole Miss	9
11	Oklahoma	13
12	Missouri	12
13	Louisville	15
14	Liberty	16
15	Iowa	14
16	Kansas St.	17
17	LSU	18
18	James Madison	11
19	Notre Dame	23
20	Toledo	21
21	Troy	20
22	Tulane	22
23	Oregon St.	19
24	N Carolina St.	—
25	Arizona	—

Out of Top 25: (24) Utah, (25) Memphis

Honorable mention: Oklahoma St., UNLV, Clemson, Memphis, North Carolina

Week 10 Top 25 2023

I mentioned in the last blog that my ratings were delayed this week.  I realized while I was compiling them that not enough credit was being given for playing a series of good opponents.  I’m ok with giving undefeated teams or teams with very good records against mediocre to bad opponents the benefit of the doubt, but I’m not OK with James Madison being #6, Liberty being #11, and Troy being #17.  I think if any of those teams played a random selection of top 25 opponents every week, their record would be about 1-9 or 2-8 right now.  

Adjusted Approach to Top 25 and Possibly to Ratings

In recent years I added what I called weights to “good” games. 

To explain how this came about, my original formula from about 18 years ago was sort of based on a 10-point scale.  If you beat every team you played and those teams beat every team they played apart from you, you’d be between 9 and 10 depending on how good the opponents of the teams you beat were.  This was the entire rating at first, but it later became sort of the first round where I used that number to decide how much credit you got for a win or how much you got subtracted for a loss. 

Realistically the best teams can hope to be around 7 (Ohio St. right now is 6.676).  So what I did with the “weights” was if you played teams better than 5 points (which right now is 14 teams), you’d have a certain number added to your overall rating.  Another 16 teams are between 4.25 and 5, so I would add a smaller number for playing those teams. 

This was regardless of whether you won or lost because you already lost points, so getting some of them back because it’s a good team isn’t a bad thing.  I don’t just want to reward beating them.  I wouldn’t want to reward Texas for beating Alabama and losing to Kansas St. (if the Longhorns had lost over the weekend) where I would not reward another team (like LSU) for beating Missouri and losing to Alabama. I actually think it’s better if you consistently beat teams lower than you and only fall short if you have a very good opponent.

Anyway, I’m starting to question if that’s the best approach.  Wherever I draw the line is ultimately going to be kind of arbitrary. I mentioned the 5-point thing.  Kansas is 4.98.  How much less credit should you get for beating them than you do for beating Louisville at 5.01?

I also didn’t want to go backwards and introduce more subjectivity on my part.  What I decided to do was just to add that initial number to what I have been publishing as the computer ratings.  I could only use a fraction of that number because the other ratings right now tops out at 0.93.  For most top 25 teams, the largest number is about 10x the smallest number, so I though the fairest thing to do was divide the largest number by 10 and then add the two together.

I’m still giving myself the leeway to move teams up to three spots for the top 25.  I might go down to two next week, and I will let you know if I made a change to the published ratings.  I want to see how it plays out.  Sometimes when I make changes, they’re great for one week but I quickly see problems going from one week to the next.  That’s fine for my top 25, but I don’t think it’s good for the computer rating.  It’s good to be able to compare numbers over longer periods of time. 

Big Picture for LSU after Bama Loss

I had a couple other quick thoughts about Saturday’s game. I’ve mentioned LSU’s personnel issues on defense. I also mentioned that the LSU defense was put in a really difficult spot in the fourth quarter when Alabama received the ball at the LSU 25 after an interception only a few seconds on the clock after the previous Alabama offensive drive (3 minutes and 65 yards).

I don’t blame Jayden Daniels for trying to make a play, the ball getting tipped, etc., but giving up a touchdown after the quick turnaround is not proof of a bad defense in that moment. No LSU fan goes on about how bad the 2019 defense was, and no one wanted Dave Aranda to be fired; but LSU gave up 41 points in that game. The Tigers gave up three touchdowns in the fourth quarter and the SHORTEST touchdown drive was 75 yards. I highly doubt that if Joe Burrow threw an interception two plays after one of those drives that the defense would have stopped the Tide from scoring.

“Hot seat” isn’t nearly dramatic enough for Baton Rouge media personalities when they get worked up about something.

So I’m not on the “Fire Matt House” bandwagon that others are on. I know that in hindsight we should have tried to spy more because knowing what we know now, the offense didn’t get close to enough points for the defense that we played. Maybe LSU would have gotten lucky and there would have been a bunch of drops and bad passes. However, we don’t know if more open receivers would have backfired. I don’t hear anyone saying Nick Saban and his defensive coach are incompetent for sacrificing QB rushing yards for more pass coverage. Jayden Daniels ran for more yards than Jalen Milroe, and the former left the game with 13 minutes left.

If both teams had scored in the 40s in an LSU win like four years ago, everyone would be happy. But LSU commentators are going on the radio or on YouTube and saying giving up 40+ to Alabama is never OK regardless.

Even though he’s one of those who I think has been too much of an alarmist about the defense, Matt Moscona pointed out an interesting thing Kelly has been dealing with. You’d think no matter how badly things went off the rails, if you take over a team less than two years after a national championship, you’d have a pretty good recruiting class coming of age. But no, there are only three players left who were recruited in the wake of that championship. The rest of the team is either players Kelly brought in or players that came to play for a team that was going .500. The older players in the subsequent classes who stayed with the team are great. I always have a soft spot for overachiever types, but to think there isn’t a significant talent gap just because we escaped with a win over Alabama last year is silly. Having a better personality and recruiting in a better location than Saban was only getting Coach O so far.

Speaking of which, I want to compare with Saban for a moment. Saban went 26-12 (68.4%) in his first three years at LSU. Kelly is at 69.5% right now. Pretty good for having almost no junior class last year and almost no senior class this year. LSU has a chance to go 4-0, but let’s say they go 3-1 the rest of the way. That would give Kelly a 70.4% mark going into next season. In his last three Division I stops, there was a significant improvement in year three; but even if there isn’t, far too many fans are overreacting.

Granted, LSU had a worse record the two years before they hired Saban than they did the two years before they hired Kelly, but there wasn’t a transfer portal back then. There were good players who had come in after respective 9- and 10-win seasons in 1996 and 1997 who didn’t have a good option other than to stick it out. (By the way, there was only an 11-game regular season back then.). Gerry DiNardo, Saban’s predecessor, won 69.7% over his first three years, so it’s not like Saban blew away anything anyone had seen in recent years right away.

To make some less big-picture comments and get back to the rankings, I think it still makes sense to put Texas ahead of Alabama.  That may change if Oklahoma loses again and LSU wins out.  I’ve mentioned that LSU can get some meaningful positive points in each of the next few weeks.  They’ll definitely be favored in the next two and they haven’t lost to Texas A&M in Baton Rouge since 1994 (the year before DiNardo started), so chances are pretty high they’ll be favored in that one too.  Unfortunately, Georgia St. (who is in between Florida and Texas A&M) has lost two in a row though.  They still may be the second-best team in Georgia.

College Football Playoff Rankings

I think it’s ridiculous that the committee thinks Oregon is the top one-loss team. The Ducks have the 82nd-best schedule. I know they played undefeated Washington, but the Huskies have played the #99 schedule. I don’t even factor in opponents’ opponents’ records as much as many similar blogs do. Some count that equally to opponents’ record because it’s a much narrower range from team to team. Utah, the Ducks’ best win, has a top-50 schedule but two losses.

The big difference comes after Oregon’s marquee win. The highest-rated opponent after that is Colorado, which is #69 overall. Alabama and Penn St. have each beaten four teams who are better than Colorado. Ole Miss, Texas, and Louisville have each beaten five teams who are better than Colorado. I can understand giving some credit for having one close loss to an undefeated team, but it shouldn’t compensate for about every other game being against a team in the top half of the FBS versus about 20% of games being against such teams. Any other team that’s a candidate for the college football playoff would be all but guaranteed to be 8-2 against the Ducks’ schedule, and most would probably beat Utah, my number 20 and the CFP’s #18.

I also don’t think Oregon St., who played no one of note out of conference, is close to the best 2-loss team. I don’t know where they get the idea the Pac-12 is so great. Arizona lost to Mississippi St. and is now half a game out of third place. Notre Dame has suffered a third loss now, but they beat USC (who actually is third place) easily. Wins over Wisconsin and TCU (albeit by lesser teams) have lost their luster.

There isn’t reason to get too annoyed yet, but the committee’s disregard of quality of opponents is something to watch out for going forward.

Comments about My Top 25

I think Purdue is better than their record, but Michigan hasn’t added as many points per week as other major-conference teams do on average.  Even with USC’s struggles, they’re worth a lot more than Purdue.  Alabama and Texas both added high-quality wins as well.  Texas was a lot closer to losing at the end, but I don’t factor that in.  

Georgia and Michigan can each get a good number of points next week though.  Penn St. (who is playing Michigan) and Ole Miss (who is playing Georgia) are right behind them, but neither the Nittany Lions (Rutgers and Michigan St.) nor the Rebels (UL-Monroe and Mississippi St.) have nearly as many potential points to gain in the last two weeks of the season as the Bulldogs (Tennessee and Georgia Tech) and Wolverines (Maryland and Ohio St.) do.

The last time Ole Miss played Georgia, Rebel QB Chad Kelly led the team to a 45-0 lead in Oxford in 2016. Bulldog QB Jacob Eason (right) was only able to complete 44% of his passing attempts and failed to throw a touchdown. Somehow the Bulldogs’ long-awaited chance at revenge is not the SEC game of the week. I wish Ole Miss would go back to those uniforms. by the way.

So if you want to see an SEC team in the playoff, you need to be for Georgia (even if you’d rather see Alabama).  If you want to see a Big Ten team, you need to cheer for Michigan (even if you’d rather see Ohio St.).  I’m not saying the CFP committee always agrees with me, but high-quality wins are usually important to them in the end.  Even if two or three one-loss teams make it, I doubt either one will be Penn St. or Ole Miss.

The order of Kansas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St. is mostly explained by what I said earlier about bad losses.

I liked not having to drop Missouri, Kansas St., and LSU too far.  Part of that is due to Tulane and Toledo playing fairly weak opponents (even though Tulane barely won again). Losses by USC and UCLA helped too. 

USC almost stayed in the top 25 given that the Washington loss didn’t hurt much, but there is only so much room for 3-loss teams.  The rest of the honorable mentions are from outside of the major conferences.

They didn’t make the honorable mentions, but Duke, Arizona, North Carolina St., and U. Miami are the other major-conference three-loss teams in the top 40.  North Carolina still only has two losses but has a relatively low schedule strength.  It’s interesting how many ACC teams are in the 30s.  Clemson (despite four losses) has a good chance of joining that group in the next few weeks.

Top 25

Rank	Team	Last
1	Ohio St.	1
2	Florida St.	2
3	Washington	6
4	Texas	4
5	Alabama	5
6	Michigan	3
7	Georgia	10
8	Ole Miss	7
9	Penn St.	8
10	James Madison	9
11	Oregon	13
12	Kansas	19
13	Oklahoma	11
14	Louisville	20
15	Oklahoma St.	24
16	Missouri	15
17	Liberty	12
18	Utah	16
19	Iowa	17
20	Troy	—
21	Oregon St.	25
22	Tennessee	—
23	Notre Dame	14
24	Kansas St.	23
25	LSU	22

Out of Top 25: (18) Southern CA, (21) Air Force

Honorable mention: Tulane, Southern CA, Toledo, Memphis, Fresno St.

Week 1 Reaction and Top 25 2023

Since the last blog…

Sometimes long weekends are the worst scenario.  It was basically Wednesday by the time I was able to review some of the things that went wrong during the LSU game. If I had waited to review all of them, I might have never written another blog.  Obviously I’m not a beat reporter in Baton Rouge, so I rely on public statements and coverage from the people who are based around the program.  That process was delayed by a day or more given that the game took place on Sunday night.  I did have Friday the 1st off, but nothing had happened yet.  I had decided to go out of town to a baseball game on Saturday, so I couldn’t write live reactions about the teams who played on Saturday. 

On Sunday, I barely made it back in time for the game, and then Mondays are workdays for me whether I go into work or not.  My bosses check to make sure I’ve made enough progress on Tuesday mornings, and I have the type of job where I always have to spend time preparing for the next day the night before anyway.  Unfortunately, I don’t just clock in and clock out without having to think about it until I clock in again.

LSU-Florida St. Reaction and Historical Comparisons

Anyway, I do feel a little good right now that at least I didn’t pick LSU to win the SEC West or make the playoff.  I’m not throwing in the towel though.  There have been teams with rough starts who ended up doing well in the SEC, but it’s pretty rare to be one of the top teams nationally.  Ohio St. got run out of their own stadium against Virginia Tech in the first week of September 2014 before winning the first College Football Playoff, but that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule.  

Also, the Buckeyes had two months before they had to play a major-conference opponent who would finish with 9 wins or more.  That was a long time to fix the issues in the Virginia Tech game, and there was even a close call against a Penn St. team (which would finish 7-6) in the interim.  I think LSU has a lot less time.  Mississippi St., LSU’s opponent a week from today, will win 9 games or more.

In Columbia on October 6, 2012, Marcus Lattimore gained as many yards on the ground (109) as Georgia QB Aaron Murray gained in the air. LSU handed South Carolina its first loss the following week. The Bulldogs would win the SEC East over the Gamecocks and the Gators.

A couple of years before that, Georgia got blown out by South Carolina, 35-7. in early October but came just a couple of yards short of beating Alabama to win the SEC and make the BCS championship game (which they most likely would have won given how easily the Tide handled Notre Dame).  I think that’s a more realistic example for LSU to hope to follow (possibly making the SEC title game and playing better than last year).  Georgia of course had to overcome that game to win the East whereas LSU’s loss to Florida St. does not count in the SEC standings.  Unlike the Ohio St. example, the Bulldogs’ next big game (in hindsight and at the time) was just a couple of games later against Florida, who would finish 11-2.  The only bad thing about following that Georgia example would be having to wait another 10 years to actually win a national championship. 

I’ll update the Florida St. rivalry blog another time, but it’s just crazy how cursed LSU seems to be in the series.  Of course, I still think LSU would have done quite well if they had played the Seminoles annually from about 2001 to 2019 (minus a couple of losses to Jameis, I suppose).

Thoughts on Brian Kelly

I said I’m not throwing in the towel on this season.  I’m also not throwing in the towel on Brian Kelly.  This was Kelly’s 15^th game.  Ed Orgeron lost to Troy in his 13^th game in charge (two weeks after a 30-point loss at Mississippi St. that I still argue was worse).  Les Miles lost his 12^th game by 20 to a Georgia team that finished 10-3.  Say what you will about Miles and Orgeron after the respective national championships, but no one was whining about it taking too long to get there at the end of 2007 (Miles’ third year) or 2019 (Orgeron’s third full year) seasons.  By the way, 2014 was Urban Meyer’s third year at Ohio St., and Nick Saban didn’t win his first at Alabama until his third year (he had taken four years to win one at LSU).  So even if it’s safe to assume a national championship is off the table already, I never thought it was a highly realistic goal for this year anyway.

LSU Head Coach Brian Kelly went on a bit of a rant at the end of his press conference on Tuesday.

Kelly can be a smooth talker, so I don’t always hold too much stock in his press conferences and whatnot, but I liked his rant at the end of his week-opening press conference.  I disagree somewhat with faulting the enthusiasm gap, but I think it was a good message to put out there, and it showed he took onboard many of the issues fans and media pointed out.

“I could go through a number of different situations.  We don’t get to the chains on third and 5… We’ve got a drop on third and 6 trying to get upfield… We’re 4^th and 1 and we’re trying to make a play instead of reading what the defender is giving you.  I could elaborate on defense.  We’re spinning down a safety[, and] he’s watching the quarterback.  We could have been more creative with play-calling.  We could have been better defensively and [made fewer] spy calls and [brought] more pressure.  I could attack the whole thing.  The bottom line is I’ve got to get our football team thinking the right way and play[ing] with a competitive edge.” 

I tried to clean up some of the grammar.  He usually speaks better than that, but I’ll forgive it.  I’ll accept some grammatical hiccups in exchange for his not sounding like a politician sometimes.

Other Results and Reactions

At least Kelly has been overshadowed somewhat by the hysterics about Dabo after Clemson’s loss to Duke.  My prediction of those Tigers being the team to beat in the ACC isn’t looking too good right now.  But that 2014 Virginia Tech team was in the ACC and ended up losing 6 games, 5 of them in conference, so we shouldn’t rush to any conclusions about that conference either.  Even if Clemson continues to disappoint, I might still be right that the ACC champion will have a good shot at the Playoff though.

If I were a betting man (sports betting is still illegal where I live anyway), I would have taken Colorado +20.5.  Although I did leave TCU ranked, I wasn’t very convinced they were going to be a competitive team this year.  Deion performed better than many more experienced coaches in getting a bunch of transfers and other new players to support each other and have the needed enthusiasm.  Whatever happens this season, he definitely did something right in preparing for Week 1.

Colorado head coach Deion Sanders confers with his son, S Shiloh Sanders, on Saturday in Ft. Worth. Sanders’ other son, Shadeur, threw for 510 yards in the upset win.

I don’t believe in making drastic changes after one week unless necessary, so I’m not dropping LSU and Clemson from the top 25.  TCU was low enough that they will drop out though.  I don’t really have the time and energy to re-work the whole thing even if I wanted to.  I don’t really have a long list of teams that were just outside of the top 25 either. 

I also wanted to put some of the conference talk into perspective.  South Carolina has a much lower status in the SEC than North Carolina has in the ACC.  The Tar Heels were the ACC runners-up in 2015 and 2022 and represented the conference in the post-2020 Orange Bowl.  They would have been #2 in the conference had Notre Dame not temporarily joined.  The Gamecocks have only made one SEC championship game, and that was back in 2010.  They have only won 8 games or more twice since the 2013 season.

Florida is obviously a more successful program in the big picture than Utah is, but the Gators lost 5 SEC games (and two other games) last season and 6 the season before, going 6-7 overall both seasons.  Utah went 10-4 in each of the last two seasons, winning the Pac-12 both years.  I know Florida beat Utah anyway last year, but you can’t expect the SEC to win every game like that.

LSU-Florida St. was the only game of the three that was an apples-to-apples comparison. 

It is interesting that the Pac-12 is disintegrating at the same the conference had the most successful Week 1; but other than Colorado, nothing is too impressive based on recent seasons.

I considered ranking Purdue in preseason, and Fresno St. beat the Boilermakers on the road. I thought it was good to make sure one team from outside of the major conferences (and Notre Dame) was included. I also considered Wyoming, which beat Texas Tech; but the Cowboys rarely sustain their early-season successes whereas Fresno St. is often one of the top teams in the Mountain West. I also take overtime wins with more of a grain of salt.

Top 25

Rank	Team	Last
1	Ohio St.	1
2	Georgia	2
3	Michigan	3
4	Alabama	4
5	Florida St.	11
6	Southern CA	7
7	Penn St.	8
8	Utah	9
9	Texas	10
10	Tennessee	12
11	Notre Dame	13
12	Ole Miss	14
13	Oregon	15
14	Duke	—
15	LSU	5
16	Clemson	6
17	Kansas St.	18
18	Washington	21
19	UCLA	16
20	N Carolina	—
21	Oregon St.	20
22	Mississippi St.	23
23	Pittsburgh	24
24	Fresno St.	—
25	Colorado	—

Out of Top 25: (17) TCU, (19) S. Carolina, (22) Boise St., (25) Texas Tech

Rivalry Week Top 25 and CFP Reaction

CFP Reaction

I ended up agreeing with the committee regarding the top 5.  I’ll be really surprised if two of the current top 4 lose this weekend.  I had said before last week that I thought Ohio St. would be one of the stronger non-champions were they to lose to Michigan.

Neither Tennessee nor Alabama, who each have two losses, had a non-conference game that was worth very much to compensate for the extra loss.  The SEC is better, but it’s not so much better that you don’t need either a very good non-conference game or a ninth conference game. 

I did think that LSU would have deserved consideration if they had finished with 2 losses, but the Tigers did get the ninth conference game when they qualified for the SEC Championship Game.  This would have given LSU a second win over a team who finished with a winning record in conference.

Anyway, as to who #6 should be, I disagree with those who have Tennessee behind Alabama.  Tennessee not only played the #1 team in the country by virtue of playing in the SEC East, but they also beat both of the top teams in the SEC West.  Alabama didn’t beat anyone in the top 6 (there are 7 teams per division) of the SEC East, and they also didn’t beat the only team with a winning conference record (LSU) in the SEC West.  The Tide did lose two games in the last second, but I think beating more good teams should count for more than how close the losses were.  Alabama didn’t have to beat a team like either team who beat Tennessee.  Texas was a better non-conference opponent than Pitt, but that doesn’t make up for Alabama playing Vanderbilt as the extra cross-divisional opponent while Tennessee drew LSU, not to mention Georgia and South Carolina.

Ratings and Other Thoughts

I don’t think this technicality matters as far as Playoff arguments but something else that annoys me is if you lose a tiebreaker for the conference championship game, you’re still considered a divisional co-champion.  Even though LSU lost after clinching the spot in the championship game, Alabama can now claim they’ve won the SEC West 10 of 11 years (the exception being 2019).  I prefer the NFL approach.  If you lose the tiebreaker to the team that advances as the winner of the division, you’re not called a champion or co-champion.  The previous time the Tide lost it outright was also to LSU, in 2011.  Since divisions will cease to exist in about two years, I hope we can get at least one more outright win in the next two years.

Back to my rankings/ratings, you may have noticed the “weighted rank” doesn’t penalize as much for losses anymore.  I’ve compensated for that by making it a smaller component of the overall total, but it still does take record into consideration to some extent.  For instance, Vanderbilt had to play four of the five best teams by conference record in the SEC and is only #39 in the weighted rankings because the Commodores also have 7 losses.  Alabama only played two of those teams and is #15 in the weighted rankings largely because there were no other losses.

So, although when I first introduced the weighted rankings they were meant to stand alone, in no universe did I think LSU was #1 last week or that Oregon St. is #2 this week (after Georgia); but those are the teams (other than Georgia) most deserving of bonus points if you will given a combination of a good record and quality opponents.  I also think it’s right that Clemson lost an extra spot (from what they are in the original unweighted formula) because their weighted rank fell to #24.  Clemson just barely edged out LSU and Oregon St. 

Sometimes you have to hold onto your hat in the last 20 minutes of a Rivalry Week game.

One might come to the conclusion that I don’t give conferences other than the SEC enough of a chance with the weighted component, but there are five Pac-12 teams in the weighted top 10 and only three SEC teams.  All things being equal, LSU and Tennessee having such tough conference slates would have caused them to finish lower than Alabama in the standings, but they both beat the Tide and ended up with the same number of conference losses as the Tide. 

USC was the only one of those five Pac-12 teams to have a better weighted rank than unweighted rank.  This was because the other four all finished with three overall losses.  It also helped that the Trojans played Notre Dame.  This compensated somewhat for USC not having played Washington and Oregon.

The other teams in the top 10 of the weighted rankings are Texas and Michigan.  Michigan is doing well being that they only played two teams in the top 40 in my overall ratings, but of course being undefeated helps.    Texas has the opposite situation: a number of top-40 opponents (4) but also a number of losses (4).  Texas has also played 5 teams that finished between numbers 41 and 65 with only one opponent (ULM) below #85.

There are only a couple of the lower teams I thought needed a little bit of explanation beyond the results of last week.

It really hurt Florida St. that Clemson and LSU lost because those games were largely responsible for the Seminoles’ having an unweighted ranking of 14 and a weighted ranking of 16 last week.  Notre Dame’s loss to USC also had some collateral effect upon the ACC as a whole as well given that the Irish beat both of the ACC title contestants and another team (Syracuse) who went .500 in conference and finished 7-5 going into the bowl game.

The only other team who seems somewhat out of place is Boise St.  The win over Utah St. wasn’t the most impressive (although to be fair, the Aggies had won 5 of 6 going into the game), but the three teams who had beaten the Broncos all had “good” weeks.  The Broncos’ worst loss, UTEP, is still not a good team; but the Miners improved their strength of schedule considerably by playing UTSA.  You probably know what happened with Oregon St. (who beat Boise St. in Week 1) and why their stock improved.  Also, BYU improved its strength of schedule with the win over Stanford (who played in a good conference and somehow beat Notre Dame…. Best wishes to departing head coach David Shaw, by the way. How he made it so long is beyond me).

Boise St. LB Ezekiel Noa sacks Fresno St. QB Logan Fife in the third quarter of what was at the time a close game in Boise on October 8. The Broncos outscored the Bulldogs 20-0 in the last 20 minutes of the game to win 40-20. A rematch will be played for the Mountain West title tomorrow, also in Boise.

I also noticed there were some games that weren’t included the last time or two I had updated the weighted rankings, so that may have played some role in why Florida St. fell after a loss and why Boise St. rose so far after a win over a now-6-loss opponent.  I think that’s also the main reason UCLA fell so much last week and rose so much this week. Without correctly factoring in how good USC was, it made the loss to the Trojans look worse than it should have; and this is now corrected.

Regardless, I like the process I’ve followed this year because it’s been a lot more stable.  I don’t like to say a given team is top 10 one week and not in the top 25 the next or that six or seven teams are in this week’s top 25 but weren’t in last week’s.  We don’t really find out that much about a team in one game, especially not when it’s 1 of 12 games, so I don’t like to see much volatility later in the year even if there are some adjustments in the methodology.

Top 25

Rank	Team	Last
1	Georgia	1
2	Michigan	4
3	Texas Christian	3
4	USC	7
5	Ohio St.	2
6	Tennessee	8
7	Alabama	9
8	Penn St.	10
9	Clemson	5
10	LSU	6
11	Oregon St.	16
12	Texas	18
13	Oregon	11
14	Utah	12
15	Kansas St.	21
16	UCLA	23
17	Tulane	20
18	Florida St.	13
19	Boise St.	—
20	Washington	24
21	Notre Dame	15
22	Troy	14
23	S Carolina	—
24	Mississippi St.	—
25	TX San Antonio	22
—	N Carolina	17
—	Ole Miss	19
—	Coastal Caroliina	25

For the detailed ratings of all 131 teams, see here or follow the link in the heading for “Knights Ratings” at any time while browsing the site.

Week 11 Top 25

This is kind of a rushed post. I always add the new rankings Saturday night or Sunday morning even if it takes until it’s sunrise for some of you; but for those who subscribe by email, it will not notify you when that is posted. Feel free to check whenever you get up on Sunday. I don’t always manage to post the conference ratings until Sunday afternoon though. By that time, I’ve also usually checked to see if any teams are out of place to make any needed corrections.

Until now, the top 25 in the blog was different from the computer top 25; but now that I’ve added the “weighted” component of the ratings, that will no longer be the case.

I apologize for this being so late, but normally I don’t even have to respond to anything work-related after 4:30 Pacific, but I was given a bunch of work right before 4:30 since one of my colleagues is on vacation. I didn’t want to have to scramble around at the last minute on Sunday, and of course I don’t want to be at all distracted on Saturday.

I also didn’t have time to update the Arkansas rivalry blog, but I should be able to update both that and the Texas A&M series this weekend. Obviously the A&M one will need to be updated again in about 8 days, so it’s possible I might wait until then.

LSU players gather around the LSU/Arkansas rivalry trophy in Fayetteville on Saturday. I can’t tell who the players in the back are, but the ones in front are (l to r) WR Jaray Jenkins, P Jay Bramblett, and S Sage Ryan.

I’ll only comment briefly about the top 25 given time constraints of it being late and there being games in less than 14 hours.

Commentary about Rankings Changes

Tennessee has passed up Michigan, but this is rather academic being that the Ohio St./Michigan winner is expected to pass up the Vols and remain ahead until the bowl season. The loser is expected to be behind the Vols and stay there until the bowl season.

With the win over Ole Miss, Alabama has passed up the Tigers, but this also likely doesn’t mean much as to the final pre-bowl ratings. If LSU loses a third game and Alabama doesn’t (unlikely against FCS Austin Peay or Auburn), Alabama will be ahead. If LSU beats UAB, Texas A&M, and Georgia, LSU will be ahead regardless of what the Tide does. I’m not making promises aout the top 4, but LSU may also pass up multiple other teams, especially those who don’t play a championship game, with wins in the remaining contests.

I doubt it has a bearing on the national championship picture, but the Pac-12 is very interesting. I was correct in suggesting people pay attention to the Washington-Oregon game last week. Putting the Huskies’ new rating aside, the Pac-12 now has four teams between #9 and #13. That’s interesting enough, but all four of those teams play another one of those teams this weekend. There will be two one-loss teams and possibly three two-loss teams in the conference heading into the final weekend. The championship now involves the best two teams, so every two-loss team after this week may still have a realistic chance if one of the winners were to lose next week.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about Texas-San Antonio (who mostly has moved up by virtue of not losing in not-very-good conference, or Oklahoma St., who has been in and out of the top 25 due to inconsistent performance.

But there is another interesting new team, which is Central Florida. You may have heard of them. The Knights will potentially unseat Tulane from a New Years Six spot by virtue of beating the Green Wave; however, there is also some potential drama in the closing weeks regarding crowning a champion of the American conference. The Knights, who have beaten both teams already, will most likely play the winner of Cincinnati (which made the Playoff last year) and Tulane (set for November 26) in championship week.

I completely disagree with championship games that simply match the two best teams, particularly when they involve a rematch (which, if the winner has a better record, is completely unfair to whomever won the first time), but it does help make for some excitement.

Top 25

Rank	Team	Last
1	Georgia	1
2	Ohio St.	2
3	Texas Christian	3
4	Tennessee	5
5	Michigan	4
6	Clemson	6
7	Alabama	11
8	LSU	8
9	USC	9
10	N Carolina	15
11	Penn St.	17
12	Utah	13
13	UCLA	7
14	Oregon	10
15	Notre Dame	18
16	Ole Miss	12
17	Central Florida	—
18	Florida St.	18
19	Coastal Carolina	21
20	Troy	24
21	Kansas St.	20
22	Washington	—
23	Tulane	16
24	TX San Antonio	—
25	Oklahoma St.	—
—	N Carolina St.	14
—	Texas	19
—	Syracuse	22
—	Liberty	25

2019 College Football Conference Report

I never thought LSU would win all the major men’s sports for an entire academic year, but I guess there are a lot of things going on I thought I’d never see.

I wasn’t going to write this since it’s based on a season that ended two months ago, but I have the time now, and I thought someone might want to read about the last full season we had.  I am writing this on Friday, a day I originally took off in order to enjoy the first round of the basketball tournament.  My last day of work for a while was Tuesday, so I may write something else in the coming days.

Anyway, I used to do conference reports more often.  I would do them weekly after each of the first four weeks and then again at the end of the regular season with a final one at the end of bowl season.  I thought I had done more than one, but the only one I could find was after Week 2.  One reason I haven’t done them as much is I’ve been rating the conferences statistically on my ratings site. Another reason is time of course.

SEC Regular Season

The SEC did not start particularly strong.  In the first two weeks, Tennessee lost twice (to Georgia St. and to BYU), Missouri lost to Wyoming, Ole Miss lost to Memphis (which turned out to be not so bad), and South Carolina lost to North Carolina.  So after two weeks, I had the Big Ten higher in the conference standings. 

Week 3 didn’t really change anything.  Mississippi St.’s loss to Kansas St. on the road wasn’t really a shock.  Arkansas beating anyone in FBS was a good thing (they beat Colorado St.).  The other wins that week would have been complete surprises had they not been blowouts.

Week 4 was a little bit more encouraging with Georgia’s win over Notre Dame.  Ole Miss and Arkansas lost, but those were not unexpected; both games could have gone either way.

Georgia WR George Pickens jumps for a reception against Notre Dame in Week 4 in Athens.

There was nothing else of note out-of-conference until Week 11, when Appalachian St. beat South Carolina.  In the mean time, Vanderbilt went 1-1 against two weak teams and Arkansas lost out of conference yet again, a blowout at the hands of Western Kentucky.  At that point things were looking even worse for the SEC than at the time of my conference report.

Apart from South Carolina’s expected big loss to Clemson (the actual margin of 35 would have been a modest estimate), the SEC won the other major rivalry-week games (Florida-Florida St., Kentucky-Louisville, and Georgia-Georgia Tech) to at least put itself back in contention for best conference.

SEC Bowls

Almost every year, I talk about how the SEC is often held to unfair standards in bowl games.  For instance, in 2018, LSU was in a four-way tie for third and had to play a team on a 25-game winning streak in the Fiesta Bowl.  The major bowls’ going deep into the SEC leaves relatively mediocre teams in big games like the Citrus and Outback Bowls.  Also, the best SEC team not in the Playoff (Georgia in 2018, almost every Alabama team that hasn’t been competing for a national championship) often has a lackluster performance based on disappointment from elimination from championship contention.

None of those seemed to be problems in this bowl season though.  There were two losses that were both understandable.  Auburn was in a tie for fifth and lost to a team who tied for second in a good conference in a competitive game.  The only other loss was by Mississippi St., who only barely made a bowl game and had some intra-squad drama (to put it mildly) in bowl prep.

Obviously, LSU beat two conference champions.  Florida, which was the runner-up in the East, beat Virginia, which was the runner-up in the entire ACC.  Georgia beat Baylor in a matchup of conference runners-up.  Alabama capitalized on a rare favorable matchup for the SEC when the Tide played fifth-place Michigan of the Big Ten. 

Lamical Perine breaks through the Virginia defense in the 2019 Orange Bowl in Miami Gardens, Fla. Perine averaged over 10 yards per carry in the game.

In another SEC-Big Ten matchup, Tennessee beat seventh-place Indiana. In record, the Volunteers were tied for fifth in the SEC, but I think when you consider that the Vols played in the (weaker) SEC East while the Hoosiers played in the (stronger) Big Ten East, it was a fair fight. 

Texas A&M beat Oklahoma St. to complete the sweep of the Big XII, and Kentucky beat Virginia Tech to make the SEC 3-1 against the ACC in bowl games.

SEC vs. Big Ten and Pac-12

The fact that the SEC had as many wins over the Big Ten as they had total losses in bowl games was a good start.  The Big Ten lost four of its last five bowl games including both “New Years Six” bowls against major-conference opponents.

The Pac-12, who won one of those NY6 games against the Big Ten, had a good bowl showing, but they have a really weak collection of bowl games and did not have a strong enough showing against other conferences during the season.

So the SEC, despite all the bumps in the road early on, ended up the clear winner.  By my count, the SEC went 17-8 against games against the major conferences (and Notre Dame).  No one else finished more than one game over .500 in such games (and that was the Pac-12, which went 8-7).

Other than the Rose Bowl game I mentioned, the Pac-12 didn’t really beat anyone to write home about.  These are the seven other wins: Florida St., Northwestern, Nebraska, Michigan St., Illinois, Texas Tech, and Ole Miss.

The Big Ten beat USC, Auburn, and Notre Dame and has such excusable losses as Alabama, Oregon, and Clemson.  So despite the bowl record, I’m still going with the Big Ten as #2 over #3 Pac-12.

Other Major Conferences and the American Conference

The Big XII had a similar record to the Pac-12 but with an even less impressive list of wins, so that was an easy choice for #4.

The American conference is next.  The AAC only suffered two losses that were not against a top conference or Notre Dame.  Only two of the losses that were to teams in major conferences (Georgia Tech and North Carolina St.) were to teams that did not make bowl games.  There wasn’t a list of great wins, but American teams did beat two major-conference bowl teams despite not having much chance at such wins in the bowl games themselves.

The ACC had a bad record (6-19) against other major conferences and only went .500 against the FBS.  Other than Clemson’s major wins, the only others are the ones I mentioned by North Carolina and Louisville. 

Remaining Conferences and Independents

That’s still more than #7 Mountain West has to brag about.  The Mountain West had a better record against major conferences but only beat two major-conference teams who made bowl games (Washington St. and Florida St.).  The MWC also lost ten games against other conferences to the ACC’s six.

The Sun Belt, which went 4-9 against the major conferences, is next.  Those wins include North Carolina and Tennessee, which both made bowl games.  Only two of the losses to the major conferences were to non-bowl teams.  The Sun Belt also lost to ten teams in other conferences, but two of those were to Memphis, which made a NY6 bowl.

Obviously, independents aren’t officially a conference, but I’d count them next.  Notre Dame got a lot more decent wins than all the other teams combined, but there were BYU’s wins over Tennessee and USC.  Those were the only wins not by Notre Dame over major-conference teams though.  It also didn’t really help the Irish that five of its wins were against the ACC.  Other wins were over Stanford, Bowling Green, and New Mexico.  Virginia and USC were good wins though.

The bottom of the barrel are the CUSA and MAC.  I have to go with the MAC last given its single win against a major-conference team (albeit a bowl team, Illinois). Ten games   There were nine wins against others, including a couple of bowl teams, so it wasn’t all bad.  The CUSA had three wins against the major teams, two against U. Miami, which made a bowl game. It had 12 wins against other teams, including multiple additional bowl teams.

Week 5 Rankings and Comments

This is the first week that I have published my computer rantings; but as I mentioned I did some trial runs before.  I won’t be following the order too closely for now, but that will partly explain some teams that may be in surprising places.

Part of the transition from subjective to objective rankings (for this year anyway) is a strict rule that the ranking of a given team can only vary 6 spots from the computer formula.  For instance, Georgia and Washington were 9 and 10, but they ended up 3 and 16. Likewise, teams that started 13 spots apart could be one spot.  If 6 seems like an arbitrary number, it is. I wanted the flexibility to put a team like Oklahoma with no losses ahead of a team like Oklahoma St. with a loss to Texas, whom I was barely able to include in the top 25. I had to leave Berkeley ahead of the Sooners though.

For now I’m keeping the top 5 the same as I had it last week, but I probably won’t next week even if none of them lose. I will give myself less leeway to deviate from the computer, and I expect at least Alabama to have a lower computer rating due to missing out on points entirely during the bye week.

North Carolina had no chance of getting what would have been the go-ahead two-point conversion try in Chapel Hill on Saturday.

Partly because margin of victory for the most-part doesn’t factor into my philosophy (except to fill in the gaps early on and except for certain narrow home victories), I am keeping Clemson #1.  I need some pretty strong evidence a team is the best to make a change at #1; it’s not purely about who had the best 5 weeks and picking a team in a vacuum.  The other candidates don’t have the quality wins necessary yet.  Georgia, with the win over Notre Dame, had the best argument on paper; but their second-best win is Arkansas St., so that doesn’t do it for me.  Alabama hasn’t beaten anyone in the computer top 50, and that may not even change if they beat Texas A&M.in two weeks.  Alabama and Clemson are a much closer 1 and 2 to other teams than earlier in the season, but I’m giving it another week.

Outside of the top 3, Auburn still has too many question marks despite being the computer #1.  Ohio St. is also up there, but the Buckeyes need a better win than Cincinnati (I never bought into the Nebraska hype, and neither does the computer). 

I decided to leave Boise St. ahead of Notre Dame.  While the Irish have the better win against an ACC team (since Virginia beat Florida St.), the Broncos beat Air Force. Notre Dame’s second-best win is over Louisville.  The Irish also have a loss, but I think Boise St. would have also lost, so that wasn’t a major factor.

Arizona St. (which beat Cal Friday in Berkeley) might not have an impressive offense, but the Sun Devils have had two impressive road wins with ball control and defense.

There are some unexpected teams after that.  Arizona St.’s being 2-1 against the top 20 with a third OK FBS win (over Kent St., whose only other loss is to Auburn) is pretty good right now.  Wake Forest is undefeated and didn’t come as close to losing to UNC as Clemson did.  SMU is also undefeated with a win over TCU.  Colorado beat Arizona St. but lost to Air Force.  More on the Falcons below.  Michigan St. lost to Arizona St. but has three fairly decent wins.  Appalachian St. is undefeated and also beat UNC more easily than Clemson did.  Berkeley is 1-1 against the computer top 10 with no other losses, so that was as low as I could put them.

I could have ranked Air Force and Virginia, but I preferred to keep undefeated Iowa and one-loss Texas.  Although LSU hasn’t had depth in its schedule yet, I think the Tigers look like a better team than Boise St. or Notre Dame.  Also, the Longhorns beat a better team (Oklahoma St.) than anyone Virginia beat. Air Force did beat Colorado, but I want to see if they can follow that up with anything before I kick Texas or someone who hasn’t lost out of the top 25. In the next five weeks, the Falcons play Navy, Hawaii, Utah St., and Army.

Not only did Kansas St. lose to Oklahoma St., but the Wildcats’ win over Mississippi St. lost its luster when the Bulldogs got blown out by Auburn.  So Virginia and Kansas St. are the only two teams to fall out from last week.

Hawaii’s Cedric Byrd II celebrates one of two touchdown catches in Reno on Saturday.

I had to rank Hawaii due to the six-spot rule, but I think the Warriors deserve it.  In addition to blowing out Nevada on the road Saturday, they’ve played three Pac-12 teams and only lost to Washington.  Oregon St., as usual, isn’t good; but the Beavers gave Stanford a game.  Arizona hasn’t lost to anyone else yet, although UCLA gave them a scare.

Speaking of the Pac-12, that conference has the highest computer rating per team.  There aren’t any undefeated teams, so the Pac-12 is outnumbered in the top 10 by the SEC.  However, the Pac-12 has more teams in the top 25 and doesn’t have as many teams below 100.  The SEC leads 3-1 in the latter category (Vanderbilt, Arkansas, and Tennessee against just UCLA). 

Top 25

rank	team	last
1	Clemson	1
2	Alabama	2
3	Georgia	3
4	Auburn	4
5	Ohio St.	5
6	Boise St.	7
7	Notre Dame	25
8	Wake Forest	9
9	Wisconsin	13
10	Arizona St.	22
11	SMU	11
12	Colorado	20
13	Michigan St.	23
14	LSU	10
15	Florida	6
16	Washington	21
17	Penn St.	14
18	Oregon	24
19	Appalachian	16
20	UC-Berkeley	8
21	Oklahoma	19
22	Oklahoma St.	—
23	Iowa	18
24	Hawaii	—
25	Texas	15

Out of rankings: (12) Virginia, (17) Kansas St.

Week 2 Conference Report and Rankings Comments

I mostly wanted to post an update about inter-conference games so far, but I came across an interesting argument on “College Football Nerds” that basically said Texas should have stayed at the same spot or better in the major polls.

“We have two weeks of actual data, and we reshuffle based on the preseason poll…  We don’t vote with our eyes, we vote with who won and who lost.”

What are we supposed to reshuffle if not the preseason poll?  Last year’s final rankings?  Do the records from last year carry over?  If so, I’m not sure 11-5 Texas with two losses in the last four games should be in the top 10 either. 

Assuming that’s not what he wants to do, two games isn’t a lot of “data” that he wants us to rely on.  Looking a certain way in those two games doesn’t necessarily say how the rest of the season will go. The important factor is having a loss right now is significantly worse than not having a loss.

The second guy says you have to be insane to think Auburn would beat Texas.

I honestly don’t know who would win.  Making Joe Burrow look like a runaway Heisman winner makes me think Texas might make Bo Nix look at least above average, and he did look good at the end of the Oregon game.  There is a pretty decent possibility based on what I’ve seen that Auburn has a better defense than LSU does, so maybe with some ball control (which LSU didn’t have) they can hold Texas to two fewer touchdowns (24 points) and score 27 like they scored against Oregon. 

What overwhelming evidence do we have that Texas plays defense better than Oregon?  None.  Losing a game like that at home doesn’t prove that Texas would have beaten Oregon at a neutral site as Auburn did.  Yes, Auburn only beat Tulane 24-6; but if your defense is doing that well, why take chances on offense?  That doesn’t say anything about what you can do when a team is making you score points to stay in the game like Oregon did. 

LSU won a similar game against Tulane on the way to winning the 2007 national championship, by the way.  The Tigers ended up winning by 25 (after a 10-9 first half), but Tulane would only win 4 games that year. I would suspect this year’s Green Wave is at least one touchdown more competent.

Of course, theoretically playing a close game and possibly beating Texas doesn’t count as much as actually doing so, so that’s why LSU is a good number of spots ahead of Auburn.  Theoretically losing to LSU (ESPN gives Auburn only about a 20% chance of winning that game right now) isn’t as bad as actually losing to LSU, so that’s why Auburn isn’t as far down as Texas is.  A 20% chance of winning a scheduled game is better than a 0% chance.

Also, unlike the polls, I had Auburn ahead of Texas at the beginning of the season, so my default position is Auburn is a better team anyway.   If I thought Texas was better going in, I would probably still have Texas ahead; but another difference between me and the polls is I didn’t expect Oregon to beat Auburn.  So I’m not saying the polls are completely right and these guys are completely wrong, but it’s not as hard to see the logic as they pretend it is. 

I do accept the point that Texas played a lot better than Michigan on Saturday, but that’s why Texas actually went up a spot and Michigan went down 5 spots.  That doesn’t mean the Michigan team that on paper in preseason looked like a much better team than Texas should drop below Texas as long as Michigan has a better record than Texas. 

Michigan forced the fumble above to beat Army in double overtime.

After about another month, I’m all in favor of discarding preseason and looking at resumes, but there isn’t enough information from this season to do that now.  In evaluating opponents, you would still need to guess at how good they are and not just look at the opponents’ resumes.  Tulane or Army, for instance, could win 10 games (they both won bowl games last year after all) or they could win 5 games (which would be much more typical of those two programs), we don’t know. 

I at least want to see LSU play Florida before I decide losing to LSU at home by 7 is better than being undefeated with a questionable performance against a “mid-major” type of team. 

I also agree with the point that Auburn will likely have more losses than Texas does, but right now I think there are 5 SEC teams (and Auburn plays all of the other 4) who would all go 3-0 against numbers 3 through 5 of the Big XII (assuming Texas and Oklahoma are the first two), so that could account for a few additional losses even if Auburn is the better team.  I’m not going to penalize a team for having a tougher schedule down the road.  I want to see how they do against that schedule and not just guess.

Anyway, there are only two conferences with winning records against teams of Power 5 conferences.   You could probably guess that the SEC (at 62.5%) is one of them.  The other is the Mountain West (54.5%), which is actually 1-0 against the SEC with the Wyoming win over Missouri.

It looks like the SEC will not be as deep as recent years though. There is a big gap between beating Texas and losing to Georgia St.  Missouri, which dominated West Virginia, is the only team that has both one of the Power 5 wins and one of the apparently bad losses.  Maybe Wyoming will turn out to be a good team, but I doubt it. 

After a disappointing opening against Wyoming, the Missouri defense nearly shut out West Virginia in the Tigers’ home opener.

Ole Miss is probably about #11 in the SEC, so I don’t mind too much their losing to Memphis, one of the best AAC teams in the last two seasons. It is something to take into consideration before giving the SEC too much credit for being far ahead of the other major conferences in terms of Power 5 record though.

In interconference FBS record, the SEC is more pedestrian at only 65%, which is actually fourth.  It’s a much closer fourth though.  It’s only 1.7% back of the ACC and Big XII, who are tied for second.

I would say the Big Ten is the best overall since it only has three total losses to the SEC’s seven.  The 1.7% I mentioned is more than made up by the SEC’s strength of schedule, so I’d rate the SEC second right now. 

I put the Pac-12 third.  It’s only won 60% of its FBS games, but lesser teams in the conference have lost to opponents like Cincinnati and Oklahoma St., so there is relatively little room to criticize.

I considered putting the MWC third, but the 53% record in FBS games made me reconsider.  I think fourth is fair given what I said earlier.

Fifth and sixth are the ACC and Big XII.  Pretty similar numbers, both 33% against Power 5, both 67% against FBS.  I put the ACC ahead because they’ve played twice as many games against the FBS though.  Also, one of the non-FBS teams was Boise St.

The only two left with winning records overall are the AAC and the Sun Belt.  Except for against Power 5 teams, the AAC has better records.  Also, the two have the same number of FCS opponents, but since the Sun Belt has fewer teams the Sun Belt has a weaker schedule as a result. 

The Independents aren’t a conference of course, but I would put them in between if you want to consider them as a group.  They have the same winning percentage against Power 5 as the Sun Belt.  Wins over Louisville and Tennessee are better than wins over Kansas and Tennessee (sorry Les).  The Independents have two non-Power-5 losses to the Sun Belt’s three.

The MAC and CUSA have done almost nothing positive out of conference.  The CUSA is 1-0 against the MAC, but since there are no other wins, that doesn’t help much.  The MAC’s only win is over Coastal Carolina, but since the Chanticleers have a win over a Big XII team, that’s at least some reason to be positive.  Also, the MAC doesn’t have a loss to an FCS opponent.

So if you didn’t follow or want to read all that, this is my current order:

1. Big Ten
2. SEC
3. Pac-12
4. MWC/Mountain West
5. ACC
6. Big XII
7. AAC/American
8. Independents
9. Sun Belt
10. MAC
11. CUSA

The Truth about the SEC and Coach O

I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and the first round of the NFL playoffs.

Unlike what a lot of professional journalists seem to be able to do, I appreciated the opportunity to see what other people are saying without any kind of agenda of my own.  Whenever I do that, I am reminded of certain things that I feel need explaining.  Both professional commentators and common fans put a lot of false narratives out there. I’m not going to mention anyone in particular because I was so relaxed in my consumption of other media I didn’t even make note of who they were.

SEC Teams and Bowl Games

One thing is that bowls are the end-all and be-all of team or conference comparisons.  SEC teams don’t tend to lose Sugar Bowls, for instance, because the Big XII participants are superior.  I covered some of this last year when people apparently thought Alabama had a good chance of losing because they were playing in New Orleans.  A common circumstance is a team goes into the SEC Championship Game hoping to compete for a national championship.  Said team loses that game and gets the Sugar Bowl as a consolation.  Are they really going to play their best game when it’s the first game they know for a fact that the goal of a national championship is off the table? 

Of course almost every team faces that reality at some point, but they’re not necessarily playing a top 15 team away from home the first time they do so, so they can get away with having less motivation.  Also, I think it’s different trying to get back on track the week after a loss than it is losing a game and then waiting a month when you know it’s just one final game.  If Georgia had lost their second game in Week Five, for instance, there would be a desire to finish strong and maybe win the SEC East, so they would still be very motivated in Week Six.  That’s not the case in a bowl game.

SEC detractors will pretend we don’t have another Big XII-SEC game as a reference point.  Of course that was when Alabama played Oklahoma, winners of close games against Sugar Bowl participants Texas and Georgia.  Even though Alabama played a closer game and looked likely to lose well into the fourth quarter, Alabama’s win over Oklahoma was never really in doubt.  So even if Clemson wins on Monday, Alabama was still tested against one of the top four teams (I would argue one of the top three teams) and came out on top.  They’re not just in the top two because of some inflated perception of the SEC, especially not the SEC relative to the Big XII.

Tua Tagovailoa fights off a tackle from Oklahoma’s Robert Barnes in the Orange Bowl. Although he lost out on the Heisman to Kyler Murray (also of Oklahoma), he led the Tide to a 45-34 victory with 4 touchdowns, only 3 incompletions in 27 attempts, and 318 passing yards.

Anyway, the other participant in the Sugar Bowl, Texas, also lost their conference title game; but what the Longhorns were playing for in that game was a berth in the Sugar Bowl, so they didn’t have the goal from their most-recent game taken from them like Georgia did. 

Imagine an NFL team is eliminated in the second round of the playoffs and a month later they play a team that didn’t even make the playoffs.  The former team isn’t going to be anywhere close to as intense as they were in the playoffs.  The latter team would be disappointed they didn’t make the playoffs and have something to prove.  Not only that, the latter team would display the intensity that it would have had in the playoffs if given the opportunity.  One of the top NFL teams is the Saints.  A couple of weeks ago, they needed a comeback at home to beat the Steelers, a team that narrowly missed the playoffs.  If they Saints were to lose their first playoff game and have a rematch with the Steelers at a neutral site, I know which team I’d bet on.  It’s not the one everyone knows had a better regular season.

Anyway, Georgia is the only SEC team in the top three of either division that lost its bowl game.  I don’t have to use tiebreakers or anything, so I’m not manipulating the rankings to make that point.  There are exactly three teams in each division who won 5 SEC games or more. I didn’t even mention Florida’s Peach Bowl win over Michigan.

If you know how bowls work, it’s not surprising that the other teams lost.  The SEC had four teams in the “New Years Six” Bowls, so that meant that the top available SEC team Kentucky was fifth (and that’s generous since they lost to Texas A&M).  They played the top available Big Ten team, Penn St., even though Penn St. was third in the Big Ten (fourth in conference record; but Northwestern lost three games out of conference, and Penn St. lost none apart from the bowl).  So when you have a lot of good teams at the top, that means teams in the middle end up playing teams at the top of other conferences.  Kentucky won anyway; but a similar calculus went into matching Mississippi St. against Iowa, and Iowa narrowly came out on top.

Kentucky RB Benny Snell led the Wildcats to the 27-24 Citrus Bowl win over Penn St. and in the process because the program’s all-time season leader in rushing yards. Kentucky also won 10 games for the first time since 1977.

Outside of Georgia’s Sugar Bowl loss, the only loss by the SEC top six the whole season to a team of another conference was Texas A&M’s controversial two-point loss to Clemson.  There were only six interconference losses by the whole conference before the bowls: three of those were to teams in the four-team Playoff, and two of the rest were by Arkansas.  (The sixth was Tennessee’s loss to West Virginia.)

Auburn, one of the SEC teams who beat Texas A&M, absolutely dominated Purdue (the fourth major Big Ten/SEC bowl) for the other SEC bowl win.  They’re a good example of a team who lost the first game after their main goals for the season were eliminated.  There was a reasonably strong shot at advancing to the SEC Championship with one loss (their first loss came by one point to LSU) and possibly winning the national championship but very little chance of either with two losses (the second loss was by 14 to Mississippi St.), so the week after their second loss, they picked up their third loss against Tennessee. 

Auburn WR Darius Slayton scores one of many early touchdowns for Auburn against Purdue. The Tigers led 56-7 at halftime and went on to win 63-14 in Gus Malzahn’s second bowl win as head coach.

Teams like Auburn are cited by SEC detractors every year as proof that the SEC isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, but only one team can make the title game out of the SEC West in a given year.  No other conference has as many aspiring national-title contenders. I don’t think any other conference has five teams who would have beaten Auburn. There might have been three in the Big Ten, maybe two in the Big XII. The eventual Pac-12 champion couldn’t even beat Auburn at a neutral site. Clemson probably would have, but I don’t know if anyone else in the ACC would have.

Tennessee’s other conference win came under similar circumstances when the Vols beat Kentucky the week after the Wildcats were eliminated from contention in the SEC East.  So if Tennessee (which didn’t even qualify for a bowl game) can get a win against one of the top six SEC teams, it’s not a surprise that Texas was able to get such a win.

I didn’t even mention how many players skipped their bowl game for the purpose of improving their NFL chances.  The top SEC teams tend to put the most players in the NFL, so I suspect this phenomenon affected the SEC more than other conferences.

Coach O and LSU

The other narrative I wanted to talk about is Ed Orgeron.  I also talked a little bit about this narrative last year. He’s far from perfect, but I’m still skeptical of the notion that LSU would have been better off with someone like Tom Herman or Jimbo Fisher.

Refer to the chart for the details, but the easiest shorthand way of comparing coach’s records is to say how many losses they have.  Other than a couple of Sun Belt coaches (who left for other conferences anyway), the only coaches with fewer losses than Orgeron in a comparable number of games since Orgeron was hired at LSU were Nick Saban of Alabama, Dabo Sweeney of Clemson, James Franklin of Penn St., and Urban Meyer of Ohio St.  Meyer won’t be coaching anymore, and I just mentioned what happened to Penn St. against Kentucky – and Franklin only had two fewer losses anyway.  So there are really only two continuing coaches who are clearly doing better at their current schools in the same time frame.

This list is limited to head coaches who have been in their positions from October 1, 2016, to present.

LSU had to cancel the 2017 game against South Alabama and unlike most of these schools has not competed in a conference championship game since Orgeron was hired before the game against Missouri on October 1, 2016.  So that partly accounts for fewer games played.

As I’m sure most readers are aware, Les Miles hasn’t coached a game since Orgeron was hired at LSU (although he will coach one in August), but I also looked at his last 34 games.  He was 23-11. In his last 38 games, he was only 25-13.  So even if Orgeron goes 0-4 to start next season (Georgia Southern, @Texas, his alma mater Northwestern St., and @Vanderbilt), he’d only fall into a tie over 38 games.  If he goes 4-0, he would be at 76.3% compared to Miles’ 65.8%.  If he goes 3-1, he would be at 73.7%, just a couple of decimal places above where he is now. 

The chart of course doesn’t account for strength of schedule.  To focus in on this year, LSU went 10-3 against a schedule that included five teams who were in the top 10 when the Tigers played them and three other teams who were ranked.  U. Miami and Auburn shouldn’t have been in the top 10 in hindsight; but if you want to use that standard, we should reduce Notre Dame’s opponents in the top 10 from two to one (since Stanford shouldn’t have been in the top 10) and Washington from three to two (since Auburn shouldn’t have been in the top 10), for instance.

Some might say I shouldn’t be that happy with Coach O being that LSU narrowly escaped the Fiesta Bowl with a victory, but actually it was a small miracle Central Florida was able to keep it that close.  The Tigers out-gained the Knights 555 to 250, had almost twice as many first downs (32 to 17), and had the ball about three times as long (44:31 to 15:29). 

It may not have been his intention, but this interception may have reminded some of the LSU coaches why they wanted JaCoby Stevens to play wide receiver going into the year.

LSU dominated a very good Louisville team two years ago in Coach O’s first bowl game as a head coach, and apart from some controversial calls and non-calls would have beaten Notre Dame last year.  I would argue these are increasingly challenging bowl games, which reflects positively on LSU in the first place, and winning two of the three is impressive regardless of the final scores.  LSU was also playing backup wide receivers in the defensive secondary for most of the Fiesta Bowl. 

This was LSU’s first win in what is now called a New Years Six Bowl (at the end of the BCS system 10 teams went to such bowls instead of the current 12) since the Tigers won the BCS National Championship following the 2007 season. The only appearance since then had been the BCS National Championship loss following the 2011 season.

I’m still not happy we didn’t give Alabama more of a game and we were certainly good enough for a couple more wins, but in what many (including me) thought would be a rebuilding year where we would be an average SEC team (or worse), 10 wins including the Fiesta Bowl is what I’d call a success.

Conference Championship Rematches

I’ve talked about how I think Auburn is basically being treated as if they already beat Georgia a second time, but when there is anything approaching parity between two teams, I think the loser has the advantage in a rematch.

Kerryon Johnson dives for a touchdown in the Georgia @ Auburn game a few weeks ago.

Of course the most obvious rematch in recent years was LSU and Alabama. After the Tigers won at Alabama, the Tide won easily at a neutral site for the national championship.

There was a similar result in the same stadium in 1996 when Florida easily won a rematch over Florida St. after a close game during the regular season. Usually rematches are for the conference championship rather than the national championship though.

LSU’s first win in the SEC Championship in 2001 was a rematch against Tennessee. That was so long ago that the West was much easier to win than the East. LSU won the West despite 3 losses that year, one of which was to Tennessee. Tennessee won by 8 in September of 2001 and lost by 11 in the championship game; so it wasn’t quite as dramatic of a swing as LSU/Alabama in the 2011 season, but it was close.

Matt Mauck jumps for a touchdown in the SEC Championship in 2001.

There was an example ESPN cited of Texas beating Colorado easily in 2005 in both the regular season and the championship, but all of these rematches are between teams where apart from the previous game, it would either be difficult to pick which team is better or the loser would seem to be the better team. In 2005, Texas would have beaten Colorado probably 10 out of 10 times.

Most of the SEC rematches were closer to the Texas-Colorado category. In 2000, Florida was still one of the best teams in the county; and like I said, winning the SEC West wasn’t very impressive back then. I don’t think anyone was surprised that Florida beat Auburn easily in both the regular season and the championship. Four years later, Auburn went undefeated and had already beaten Tennessee by 24 in Knoxville. The Vols made it closer (38-28) in the rematch, but the gap was too large to start out with.

Granted, Georgia would have to make a bigger swing in the final score than LSU did in 2001 (they lost by 23), but I don’t think either the Bulldogs offense or defense was playing the way they normally would toward the end. When you throw the ball a lot, you can have much quicker three-and-outs, which puts more pressure on your defense than it wouldn’t normally feel.

As we saw against LSU, Auburn can score in bursts, and it’s a matter of being able to stop them and respond before it gets too bad. Once Auburn had scored 30 unanswered points against Georgia, it was too late. Had they only scored 20 unanswered instead (or had Georgia re-established its offense sooner), it would have been a one-possession game into the fourth quarter and changed the approach of both sides.

My feeling is that if Auburn is able to get a big lead, they can easily grind out Georgia the rest of the way again. We don’t know what happens if Georgia roughly keeps pace for three quarters though.

Although the TCU-Oklahoma game had a closer final score (38-20), it was 38-14 at halftime, so I think it will be easier for Oklahoma to overpower the Horned Frogs early and often than it will be for Auburn against the Bulldogs. Auburn only led 16-7 at the half.

Clemson-Miami and Wisconsin-Ohio St. are not rematches, so the other notable rematch likely does not have a bearing on the national championship, but USC-Stanford may be the best game of the bunch.

Freshman RB Stephen Carr had 129 all-purpose yards against Stanford in September, but it’s unclear how relevant that game will be tonight.

Although the Trojans won by 18 back in Week 2, Stanford has been the better team in the last two months. Both have lost at Washington St. by 3 points, but Notre Dame beat USC by 35 and lost to Stanford by 18. Stanford has no other losses since September 17.

Stanford has had more of a habit of playing down to opponents than USC has, but I don’t think that will be relevant to this game. I think it’s interesting that USC is favored, but ESPN’s FPI power index gives Stanford a 57% chance of victory. It may be that gamblers have been burned by picking Stanford more times than they have by USC.