It was a busy couple days of college football. Here’s where it left the picture, in our model’s eyes:
Moving Up: Oregon (to #1), Notre Dame (to a bye), Tennessee (to a home game)
Movelor—our model’s power rating system—cares primarily about margin of victory, so Oregon beating Oklahoma State by more than sixty points resonated. Oregon really is playing like the best team in the country right now. But can they be the best team in the country in December?
Tennessee impressed against East Tennessee State, and Georgia’s sloppy showing against Austin Peay leaves our model high on the Volunteers heading into next weekend. Good opportunity.
Notre Dame was lifted by a bunch of rising tides. The Irish have less downside than a lot of their peers.
Moving Down: Ohio State (to #2), Georgia (out of a bye), Mississippi (to a road game)
We’ll have more on this in our Week 2 takeaways post (check the homepage for that), but subjectively speaking, Ohio State’s still the best bet to wind up the best team in the country. Oregon might be better right now, but Ohio State has a little more talent, which really means it has a little more depth, which really means it’s better insulated against catastrophe. That isn’t an aspect of college football we’ve managed to teach our model yet.
Georgia failing to win more convincingly wasn’t the problem. The problem is what it implies about where they’ll go from here. They could absolutely turn out fine. But Movelor doesn’t trust them as much as it did.
Movelor loved Mississippi preseason, at least relative to the expert consensus. The pair are now meeting in the middle.
Moving In: USC, Ohio
Whoa boy. Lot to explain here.
USC was better last year than people give them credit for being. We’ve mentioned that before. They’ve also performed well in their first two games. Not too many teams have done that.
Ohio is a weirder case. They’re not as likely to make the playoff as USF, Memphis, or Tulane, and they don’t have as good of an average final CFP ranking as USF. However, USF isn’t favored to win the AAC. Memphis is. And because so much more can go wrong for Memphis than can go wrong for Ohio, Ohio has a better average finish. Pick your poison.
Moving Out: LSU, Tulane
Tulane had a hard time against South Alabama but they survived. No harm, no foul, just a lesser impression of them.
LSU looked bored against Louisiana Tech, and not in a good way. The Tigers will be fine, but coupled with Clemson’s disappointing showing against Troy, our model now has them on the outside looking in, right in between Alabama and Illinois. Good company to keep, but LSU fans will be understandably frustrated.
Playoff probabilities and average final rankings, with full outputs from our model available here:
Alabama’s recovery is noteworthy. In addition to obliterating Louisiana Monroe, Movelor learned more about how good Florida State probably is, which translates to that loss being a smaller deal for Bama when our model gets to the committee portion of each simulation. (Movelor is still probably behind on Florida State, who could come back around and ironically save Alabama’s butt, provided eight different things break in the right direction.)
Only one SEC team has a playoff probability above 50%, and it isn’t above 50% by much. Nevertheless, our model does expect three or four SEC teams to make the CFP. It’s a deep conference at the top, and it lacks a thriving best team.
How good everybody is:
The big mover here is Oregon, but we’ll also call your attention to Illinois, Missouri, and Oklahoma, all of whom had a great week. Then, there’s North Dakota State. Right ahead of Clemson. The Bison are back, everybody.
If you enjoy these posts and want to receive them more directly, we have two options for you. The first is to subscribe to our Substack, where we currently exclusively publish college football blog posts roughly six days a week. The second is to subscribe to our daily newsletter, a morning rundown of everything going on at The Barking Crow.
**
