Coastal Carolina’s New Years Six Paths Come into Focus

Goodness gracious.

Florida’s ranked seventh?

The Kyle Pitts argument Gary Barta made is an interesting one. In a game that close, it’s fair to say that Florida would have won had Pitts been available. It’s something we’ll be looking at as we build our model for next year—a possible addition to the Kelly Bryant Rule. But still…

We’re about to get technical, so if you don’t want to read technical things, scroll down to the next bolded headline. That’s where we’ll get into actual implications of all this, and where we’ll talk about Coastal Carolina.

Our model’s FPA metric is our guide to how much the rankings are deviating from precedent. This year, they’ve been deviating a lot, and that’s to be expected. It’s a strange year, and precedent doesn’t say what happens when 5-0 teams are compared to 10-1 teams. Still, one would expect teams with sparse résumés to be treated similarly to one another, and teams with more conventional schedules to be treated similarly to one another.

That has not been the case.

In the scale our model uses, Alabama is at 100.0 and Louisiana-Monroe is at 0.0, with the rest of the FBS in between. Which means, among FPA-relevant teams (teams the model needs to address in order to adequately adjust its rankings to those of the committee, a subset that includes the top 25 plus Buffalo, Ball State, and Boise State), the average Big 12 school is being given a boost equal to 5.7% of the gap between the FBS’s best and its worst, and the average Big Ten team is being pulled down by 1.3% of that gap.

Our model, we should note, does not make preemptive adjustments between Power Five teams based on conference, due to the inconsistency of conference strength over the last six years (we’ve considered exploring an SEC adjustment, but haven’t found it necessary to get the right playoff teams, so we haven’t risked it). Our model does have a Group of Five adjustment, meaning that the FPA happening is being given in addition to that precedented deduction.

This is what’s so weird about the rankings this year. The Group of Five already gets a deduction every year, and this year—when there’s an 11-0 team with two ranked victories and an 8-0 team with the seventh-best APD (adjusted point differential, or how much that team is beating its opponents relatively to its opponents’ opponents) in the country—even Group of Five teams from leagues playing a full season are being punished.

The Pac-12 being held back makes sense. The Big Ten being held back makes sense, and it’s fair at this point in history to hold it back less than the Pac-12. The ACC and Big 12 boosts don’t make sense, though, and neither does the Full-Season Group of Five average deduction.

Florida (5.4 FPA), Iowa State (3.4 FPA), Georgia (2.5 FPA), and Oklahoma (5.6 FPA) do drive some of their conference’s boosts. But the bigger boosts, and perhaps more telling ones, are coming in the form of UNC (10.6), Texas (7.5), Oklahoma State (6.3), and NC State (13.8!). And while sure, it’s hard to find other teams to put in the top 25 ahead of those four (the committee had to dig deep to find Missouri last week—the Tigers dropped to 57^th in our model’s rankings once their FPA was removed upon their removal from the top 25), you do have Buffalo and Boise State among short-season schools and Marshall and Liberty among full-season schools, all of whom are in the top 35 even with a glut of hard-for-our-model-to-assess Pac-12 and Short-Season Go5 teams surrounding them (the next full-season Power Five school in our model, after FPA-adjusted NC State, is 45^th-ranked Auburn). In other words, the committee has options, and believable options who’ve accomplished comparable accomplishments to those of NC State.

There was hope at the beginning of the season that we’d see something fresh and new as a byproduct of the Pac-12 and Big Ten’s short (at that point, nonexistent) seasons. And we have seen something fresh and new. Unfortunately, it’s been a fresh and new deviation from results, and from precedent.

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Now. As far as implications themselves, go…

No Love for the Pac-12

We were ready (though not as ready as ESPN…) for USC to make a leap. They didn’t. The Trojans are 13^th, and it’s hard to see a scenario in which they leapfrog enough teams to make the playoff. They can safely be considered out, even in the event of disaster next weekend.

Florida’s Still a Factor

If a Kyle Pitts-playing Florida team beats Alabama, they’ll be in the mix, and they’ll be compared to either a one-loss non-ACC champion Notre Dame team or a two-loss non-ACC champion Clemson team, in addition to Texas A&M, the Big 12 champion, and Alabama. This is a tricky scenario, and it’s not hyper-specific. All it requires is a Gator win on Saturday, which while unlikely, isn’t so unlikely that you’d bet anything of biological import against it happening. How would the committee parse that situation? We don’t know. As it stands, there’s a big gap in our model (7.4 percent of the entire FBS spectrum) between Clemson and Florida. But beating Alabama would be a game-changer for the Gators, and another loss from Clemson would pull them downward. There’s also the head-to-head result for A&M. The bottom line is, our model doesn’t know exactly how close Florida is to Iowa State or how close both those teams are to the top five, and because both are getting big boosts relative to precedent, our model errs on the side of those boosts being as small as possible to fit these rankings.

We’ll see.

UNC Stays Behind CCU

Coastal Carolina got a small moral victory from UNC staying behind them in the rankings. Now, if the ACC runner-up doesn’t make the playoff (not particularly likely, but a real scenario), UNC won’t take a New Year’s Six berth away from the Chanticleers. Will it matter? Let’s check. As it stands, here are the eight teams in line for NY6 berths, after the playoff:

Texas A&M (Ranked 5^th)
Iowa State (Ranked 6^th, Placeholder Big 12 Champion)
Florida (Ranked 7^th)
Georgia (Ranked 8^th)
Cincinnati (Ranked 9^th, Placeholder Group of Five Representative)
Oklahoma (Ranked 10^th)
USC (Placeholder Pac-12 Champion)
UNC (Placeholder ACC Orange Bowl Representative)

With Indiana also ahead of Coastal, it doesn’t look great, but at the same time, the Chants only need to jump one team if the ACC doesn’t send two to the playoff, two teams if the ACC does send two to the playoff, and three if Northwestern stuns Ohio State and gets themselves a NY6 bid. So, who could Coastal jump?

The first candidate is Indiana, because they’re the closest. The Hoosiers don’t play this weekend, while Coastal, of course, plays a ranked-for-now Louisiana-Lafayette team in the Sun Belt Championship. Could Coastal jump IU with a win? We don’t know. But it’s certainly possible.

The next candidate is Oklahoma, because they’re the next-closest and, if they lose to Iowa State, there’d be a concrete result upon which the committee could reevaluate them. Again, we have no idea what the committee would do. We’ve expected them, numerous times this year, to take advantage of an opportunity to reevaluate an oddly-ranked team. In most cases, they’ve stuck to their guns.

After Oklahoma, we jump to Iowa State, because one of those two has to lose. Iowa State has further to fall for CCU to jump them, but if this scenario were in play (and we should mention that CCU beating ULL is close to a coin flip in terms of likelihood), CCU would’ve twice beaten a team that beat ISU by three scores in Ames. Would the committee dig in its heels? It has so far. But it also might loosen up, especially with some rather direct media pushback starting last night.

There’s also Cincinnati, who isn’t guaranteed to beat Tulsa. A loss by the Bearcats and a win by the Chants would render leapfrogging irrelevant, as one would assume Coastal would then get the Group of Five’s bid regardless of everything else.

And finally, Florida, though it’s hard to see any loss to Alabama being reason enough for the committee to let go of the Gators.

There are paths for the Chants. Not great paths, and paths that could lead to a kids table matchup with Cincinnati…but paths nonetheless. In the meantime, we may be headed for multiple teams claiming the national title—perhaps as many as three.

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So, stay tuned. We’ll revisit on Friday, or perhaps before then. After all, there’s a virus out there that could lay waste to the best-made plans.

Yikes.