The newest College Football Playoff Rankings weren’t without controversy (this is the media, after all), but meaningful surprises were few and far between. Here’s how they changed the playoff picture, through the eyes of our model:
Number One
Ohio State leapfrogging LSU wasn’t too surprising. Our model raised its digital eyebrows two weeks ago when the Tigers came in ahead of the Buckeyes for the first time, and while it never expects a course correction out of the committee, instead taking what they say, boiling it down to a number called FPA (Forgiveness/Punishment Adjustment), and keeping that number tied to the team going forward with few exceptions, it did get a small course correction this week. On the 0.0-100.0 scale we use to gauge the rankings in which the top-ranked team is at 100.0 and the bottom-ranked team, in all of the FBS (extending to 130, not just 25) is at 0.0, the FPA adjustment for LSU was merely -0.7 this week, bringing their total FPA down to 4.4. For Ohio State, it was 0.7, bringing their total FPA up to -2.3. Nothing to see here.
Except…
In the event LSU, Ohio State, and Clemson all win out (occurs in 26.1% of simulations), Oklahoma, Utah, and Alabama are the most likely teams to take the fourth seed in the playoff. Alabama would be a tough draw for the overall number one seed, even without Tua Tagovailoa, but Utah and Oklahoma, combined, are more playoff-likely than the Tide, which translates to a small expected advantage for the number one seed. Thanks to this combined shift of 1.4 in FPA, Ohio State’s national championship likelihood rose from 43.7% to 46.0%, while LSU’s dropped from 19.7% to 17.5%.
Baylor’s Alive, and Minnesota’s Hope Grows
All season, our model has said Baylor doesn’t really have a chance. This was backed up by the committee’s rankings, even after they erased the Bears’ significantly negative FPA following the Oklahoma loss.
This week, that all changed. Baylor’s Post-Week 13 FPA of 3.0 was the second-largest of anyone in the country, trailing only Virginia Tech’s 9.5. It multiplied their playoff chances more than fifteen-fold, so Baylor now sits just ahead of Minnesota at 4.6% likely to crack the field.
Of course, Baylor’s odds relative to their conference championship odds are still much worse than those of Minnesota: Baylor’s 33.7% likely to win the Big 12, whereas Minnesota’s 4.8% likely to win the Big Ten; but the gap in playoff probability is only 4.6% to 4.0%. Some of this can be accounted for by noticing that Minnesota has to win this weekend to have a chance to win the Big Ten, so all scenarios in which they win their conference have a one-loss Gophers team when all’s said and done, whereas Baylor could lose to TCU and still win the Big 12. Still, Minnesota’s in a better place as far as “controlling their fate” goes, and for their part, the Gophers got a 0.7 FPA of their own to help the cause.
No Love for Michigan
Our model didn’t expect Michigan to make the playoff, but it did expect the committee to make more of their road throttling of Indiana, who our model believes would be ranked 36th if rankings extended that far. Michigan does still evidently have a path, as they’re 0.2% playoff likely, but a one-in-500 chance is not much of a chance at all.
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We’ll have more on each of this weekend’s big games come Friday or Saturday. As always, fire away with questions if you have them, either by email or over Twitter.
