Texas is back, and it brought a friend.
This week’s CFP Bracketology, from our college football model:
Moving In: Texas, Texas Tech
We say it a lot, but there are two ways to move up in these projections: Improve your existing résumé or improve your expected résumé.
Texas did the latter: Nobody will care that they beat Sam Houston by 55, but it improved their Movelor rating—our model’s power rating, a measure of how good each team is right now—enough to shift their outlook the rest of the way. They’re the second-likeliest team to make the SEC Championship. That’s good.
For Texas Tech, it was a little of both. The Utah win is useful in the Big 12 race and should hold up as an impressive road win, a blowout against a team whose average simulated season ends 8–4. But the win also improves that rest-of-season outlook. Movelor now has Texas Tech second-best in the Big 12, worse on paper than only BYU (and only by about half a point).
Importantly, Texas Tech is not the 11-seed. They’re the 10-seed. Their average final résumé is tenth-best in the country. That’s at-large territory, which is partly so big because they’ve only got a 1-in-6 chance to win the Big 12 (without accounting for tiebreakers).
Moving Out: Utah, Illinois
Utah is still in Movelor’s top 25, and they’re only a field goal worse than the Big 12’s best (per Movelor), but that was a bad loss. Almost as bad as…
Letting Indiana beat you by more than seven touchdowns. Curt Cignetti’s a point differential merchant, a bully when he’s winning and a coward when he’s overmatched, but that’s not new. Margin matters to the playoff committee, explicitly in some ways and implicitly in others. Illinois still has a playoff chance, but blowout losses don’t help, and this blowout loss probably came against the Big Ten’s third chair. Maybe fourth, if Penn State’s expectations were anywhere close to correct.
Moving Up: Indiana
Indiana’s into a bye, and I want to stress what we mean by that:
- Our model is saying that Indiana has a better average final outcome than Georgia.
- Our model is not saying that three Big Ten teams will finish ranked ahead of the SEC champion.
There isn’t a perfect way to do bracketology. In basketball, where everyone’s used to bracketology, this isn’t as much of an issue. Conference standings matter less there. In football, it’s all still very new, so there isn’t really an industry norm. What I see most people putting out there is a modal bracketology, meaning the single 12-team bracket most likely to occur, meaning the 12-team bracket that occurs if every game goes the way that person expects. This is a fine way to do it. We’d rather give our best projection for each individual team, even if it makes the bracket look ridiculous in the early going. Oregon and Ohio State and Indiana and Penn State will knock one or two of each other downwards. Someone will win the SEC. But right now, Indiana’s got a better outlook than Georgia.
Moving Down: Georgia, LSU
Still, imagine Georgia drawing Indiana in the Sugar Bowl. The turtling Cignetti would do…
Georgia’s out of a bye. LSU’s out of a home game. That Clemson win doesn’t have any significant juice anymore. It’s a fine road win, but 14 of the SEC’s 16 teams are better on paper than Clemson is. Florida is Clemson-adjacent. AP Poll voters say LSU’s the number three team in the country because they beat Florida and Clemson. AP Poll voters also say that Florida and Clemson are so bad they might consider firing their coaches. Make of that what you will. Our model says LSU has the ninth-best expected outcome. That sounds right to us.
Playoff probabilities and average final rankings:
A few things that stand out here:
Memphis’s win over Arkansas was a pivotal moment in the Group of Five race. Arkansas might lose a lot of games, but that was winnable for them and highly losable for Memphis, who is probably the best mid-major FBS team. There’s now roughly a 3-in-4 chance that the AAC sends it champion to the College Football Playoff.
Only five teams are better than a 50/50 chance to make the playoff. Out of Penn State, Texas, and LSU—three foregone conclusions in the eyes of conventional wisdom—it’s likelier that only one makes it than it is that all three make it.
The ACC has a clear leader in Miami, though we should stress that Movelor probably won’t catch up on Florida State for another two weeks. That’s not necessarily bad news for Miami, whose biggest threat is distraction. It’s not even necessarily bad news for Louisville and Georgia Tech, neither of whom plays FSU. But it’s news.
The Big 12 has a clear leader but by a narrow margin. Two playoff teams is likelier there than one, but combined with the ACC, we should currently expect three playoff teams from the pair.
Since we’re getting into expected bids by conference, pencil the Big Ten in for four, the SEC in for three, and the combined ACC–Big 12–Group of Five–Notre Dame universe in for the remaining five, with three of those automatic bids. That’s the modal outcome right now, defining “modal” differently from how we defined it above. Again, there are a ton of ways to do playoff bracketology. This approach would lead us to remove LSU and Alabama in order to insert BYU and Notre Dame. That would feel kind of dumb.
Movelor’s Top 25:
These are mostly marginal, but…
Ohio State passed Oregon, which passes the smell test. I would like to refine Movelor in the future to react a little differently in games where the spread’s already huge. Missing a 48-point spread by two touchdowns is different from missing a 17-point spread by two touchdowns.
Texas passed Alabama, which feels like a coin toss right now. Texas sitting seven points back of Ohio State is a solid early-season data point, though, and the Georgia/Texas/Average–Version–of–Alabama triumvirate does seem to sit above that next wave.
Indiana passed Penn State, which we alluded to above. For how much we’ve criticized the Penn State hype, I do think they’re probably better than the Hoosiers. Nobody does point differential like Cignetti, which over the long run should lead Movelor to very slightly overrate IU.
Mississippi passed LSU back, which is relevant ahead of this week.
How about Vanderbilt? Almost as good as Oklahoma. Which is relevant, given how excited Oklahoma is about beating a bottom-half SEC team through a trick play. (The Michigan win looks better now. John Mateer is awesome. Oklahoma’s back to respectable. They just probably shouldn’t be expecting playoff considering they still have to play six teams whom Movelor has listed as better than the Sooners.)
If we’re categorizing into four-point tiers, we’ve got:
- >46: Ohio State
- 42–46: Oregon
- 38–42: Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Miami, Indiana, Penn State
- 34–38: Mississippi, LSU, Notre Dame
- 30–34: Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, USC, BYU, Texas A&M
That all passes the smell test, and the winner of Mississippi/LSU moving up likewise makes sense. I won’t go so far as to say Movelor’s all caught up—we’re still waiting on Florida State and a few others—but it should be there after Week 6. There shouldn’t be a situation like last year where Indiana was still undervalued late into October. Congratulations to our spreadsheet.
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