It was a bad weekend to be a team on the playoff bubble:
- Alabama survived its trap game.
- Texas A&M silenced any remaining doubters.
- BYU won as a betting underdog in Ames.
- There was only one upset in the ACC and the team who went down was a fringe character, SMU.
- Mississippi got its best win of the season.
- Texas survived a trip to Starkville.
- Utah resumed beating the crap out of teams.
The result is that even with Memphis handing USF its first loss, nobody moved in or out of our model’s College Football Playoff Bracketology. There was movement, and there’s a lot to talk about, but most of what happened is that A&M, BYU, and Mississippi moved towards safety while almost everyone else slipped a little closer to the brink.
Three big things to address before we show you the bracket:
Mississippi Isn’t There
First, Mississippi still isn’t in our model’s projected playoff field despite being 7–1 and favored to win every remaining game. To be fair, it does have these guys 55% likely to make it, but it’s listing an 88% playoff probability even if Ole Miss does finish the regular season 11–1 or 11–2. In the real world, that’s probably very close to 100%.
Our model will probably correct itself on this next Tuesday. When the CFP committee’s first rankings come out, they’ll have Mississippi ranked higher than our model expects, and it’ll adjust and be fine from there on out. But the model isn’t seeing ghosts here. Mississippi’s résumé has issues. That “biggest win of the season” came against a team who’s probably going to be 6–3 after Saturday night. The second-biggest win is LSU, who just fired their head coach. Our model cares a lot about a metric we call Adjusted Point Differential (APD). APD is a moderately schedule-adjusted measure of a team’s total point differential, and it’s a solid proxy for what gets lumped in as “the eye test.” Mississippi has only beaten two teams by more than one possession: Georgia State and Tulane. Its other five wins came by eight points or fewer, and Kentucky, Arkansas, and Washington State aren’t exactly a murderer’s row.
Our model does include some hedging on how much conference championship losers will be punished, but in 25% of simulations the punishment is the same as it would be for a regular season loss. That might be playing into some of this. Either way, Mississippi should not test whether its 10–2 record is enough to make the playoff. Not if the ACC and Big 12 each submit multiple one-loss teams. Not if Notre Dame and Vanderbilt both finish 10–2 themselves.
USF Stayed In
Memphis beat USF, and USF’s still the leader for that fifth automatic bid. Why? Well, USF’s still favored to win the American, and if they do that they’ll probably be the highest-ranked mid-major conference champion. It’s a close race—we’ll have all of this below, but USF, Memphis, and JMU are all between 17% and 25% playoff-likely—but at the moment, USF still leads. Florida isn’t an amazing win, but it’s a good one, and road losses to Miami and Memphis aren’t going to sink the ship.
The Tiebreaker Situation Is Uncertain
Our model still only accounts for two-team and three-team tiebreakers, and it only treats those as non-random if the tie can be solved by direct head-to-head. We’re going to start looking this week to see if there are any other specific scenarios we can program in, but I’m only fully confident in our model’s projections for the Big Ten Championship. All the other leagues have some messy situations still on the table.
To be clear, only covering two-team and three-team tiebreakers which can be solved by head-to-head is mostly enough. Nobody’s going to see their playoff probability move by ten percentage points as we get all the tiebreakers in. But we don’t want to mislead anybody.
The Bracket
Ok. Here we go:
Moving Up: Texas A&M, BYU
The Aggies are not our SEC favorites, but they’ve got the highest average final ranking in the SEC, and that’s enough to push them up into bye position. Our model only has them 21% likely to actually land a bye, but right now, they’ve got the fourth-best average finish in the country.
BYU is probably not the best team in the Big 12, but they’re our Big 12 favorites, the only team in the league likelier than not to make the conference championship. They’re up to a home game.
Moving Down: Alabama, Texas Tech, Miami
Alabama’s out of that bye, and the problem for them remains that they lost by two touchdowns to Florida State. That is a horrible loss. They should make the SEC Championship, but they aren’t the odds-on favorite yet to win it.
Texas Tech moved down to a road game. They do control their fate in the Big 12, but with Kansas State playing better again, these next two weeks (at K-State, home against BYU) are crucial.
Miami also moved down to a road game. They’re currently fractions of a ranking ahead of Mississippi for the last spot in our field. They do have five games left (most teams have four), so more opportunities remain to rise and more opportunities remain to crash and burn.
Probabilities, Average Final Rankings
There are twelve teams more than 50% likely to make the playoff, but because they’re all high-majors, only eleven of them can make it. Most likely, this will resolve itself (and other high-majors will play their way in). But it’s crowded right now.
Probabilities, Average Final Rankings (continued)
In order, Mississippi, Utah, Louisville, and Cincinnati are our first four teams out, and yes, it’s very funny that Louisville and Scott Satterfield have identical average final rankings and identical playoff probabilities. There’s a big drop-off in probability after Mississippi, and if you exclude the mid-majors (who are running a different race), there’s a big drop-off again after Cincinnati. For those wondering, USC, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and Missouri come next after Texas.
Among mid-majors, it’s not a three-horse race. North Texas and Tulane are still in contention in the American, and Boise State isn’t out of it, a 2-in-3 favorite to win the Mountain West whose only losses came on the road against USF and Notre Dame. The mid-major team has to be a conference champion. If it’s Boise State vs. Memphis, Memphis did beat a common opponent, but Boise State didn’t lose at home to UAB. (Memphis probably gets the bid in that scenario, but it’s not a lock.)
Where is Navy? Not here yet. They’re an underdog in each of their next four games.
How Good Is Everybody?
Movelor’s Top 25:
How Good Is Everybody? (continued)
Texas has officially left that second pack, but if public sentiment’s correct, Mississippi and Texas A&M are about to join it. Our model only has Ohio State 40% likely to win the national title, even as at least an 8-point favorite in every playoff game. That second pack is a good place to be.
Miami still looks like the best team in the ACC on an average day, They don’t control their fate, though, which is bad for bubble teams. Georgia Tech’s still an automatic bid in our bracket, not an at-large selection.
In the Big 12, the best team on paper has two conference losses, and they came to the two other teams who are definitely good. There isn’t much of a path for Utah to make the Big 12 Championship. One complication here that’s relevant for this weekend: Cincinnati is one of only two FBS teams who’ve covered every Movelor spread this year. (The other is Southern Miss.) That means there’s more of a chance Movelor’s still too low on Cincy than there is for any other power conference team.
Movelor doesn’t make any “you fired your coach” adjustments, but LSU and Penn State are both close enough to 26th that they could be off the graphic after another game. We’ll see how bad they both are. It’s possible LSU gets a bounce. That does happen sometimes with interims, as we’ve seen with UAB and UCLA. So far, Penn State’s rating makes sense given we’ve only seen them play Iowa. But their spiral could easily restart. It’s spiral season.
**
