It’d be hard to find someone who’d argue college football’s eleventh full week didn’t meet expectations. LSU and Alabama delivered their most exciting game in recent memory. Minnesota not only gave Penn State a fight but actually took down the fourth-ranked Nittany Lions. Even Oklahoma provided some excitement, allowing Iowa State to come nearly all the way back in the nightcap before escaping with a victory.
These results, of course, have ramifications, but what those ramifications will be are often warped by the narrative. Coverage of the playoff picture most often trends in two directions: in one, commentators say with certainty what will happen in a few different scenarios; in the other, commentators argue with one another about what should happen in a few different scenarios.
Evidently, this is what the market demands, but if your goal is instead to understand the uncertainties surrounding the committee’s choices, the likelihood of different events coming to pass, and the impact different factors really have on the eventual College Football Playoff, you’ve come to the right place. Here are the answers to what we’d guess are your most pressing questions coming out of the weekend. As always, they’re coming with a lot of help from our model.
What does the win mean for LSU?
LSU did it. They beat Alabama, and on the road, no less. Joe Burrow is the Heisman favorite. Ed Orgeron is even more of a folk hero than he was 72 hours ago. It was a massive victory, increasing LSU’s playoff chances from 58.9% to 86.2%, and their national championship likelihood from 9.5% to 16.5%.
Our model doesn’t think LSU’s going to be ranked first tomorrow night. You can see its full predicted rankings later in this piece, but to spoil the surprise, our model has Ohio State ahead of LSU by a decent margin. It’s within the expected margin for error, so it wouldn’t be surprising if LSU came out on top, but our model still thinks it’s more likely than not that Ohio State will be ranked number one.
How can this be?
Our model puts a lot of stock into a team’s best two wins, and to be sure, LSU has the edge in that. Their victory in Tuscaloosa is the best win in college football this year. LSU and Ohio State’s respective second-best wins, though, road victories at Texas and Indiana, are viewed as roughly equivalent by our model. Strength of schedule washes out close to the same. Their records, of course, are equal. Where Ohio State makes up the difference and more is Adjusted Point Differential (APD), which is basically how thoroughly a team defeats or is defeated by its opponents. It’s built to estimate the impact rating systems and the dreaded eye test have on the committee, and it’s extremely impressed by what the Buckeyes have done so far this year.
Working in LSU’s favor is that APD is a crude metric pointing at shadows of other variables. It’s as accurately folded into our model as it can be, but it’s a big reason our model’s error margins are as wide as they are. A much more accurate reflection of how the committee is thinking will be the committee’s actual thoughts, which we’ll see reflected in the rankings when we receive them tomorrow evening. If LSU’s the top-ranked team, it’s bad news for Ohio State’s title chances, and for the Buckeyes’ hopes of having any margin for error themselves.
What does the loss mean for Alabama?
The last time Alabama lost at home, back in 2015, it came to Mississippi. Alabama would go on to win the SEC that year en route to a national championship.
That’s worth virtually nothing in predicting where this year’s Crimson Tide will end up.
The immediate question for Alabama is, as it is with LSU and Ohio State, where they end up tomorrow night. It was certainly a respectable loss, so it shouldn’t hurt them too much, but our model guesses at least Clemson will pass them.
The longer-term question is whether a one-loss Alabama would have the edge over a hypothetical one-loss Pac-12 or Big 12 champion. The answer to that is, at this point, unknowable, because it depends so much not only on wins and losses but on how, exactly, teams go about winning and losing. Oklahoma’s narrow escape at home against Iowa State didn’t do them any favors. Oregon’s loss to Auburn would stack up poorly against an Alabama blowout of the Tigers in the “common results” criteria, but still could be outweighed by a Power Five Conference Championship, a variable that’s historically held weight. If Alabama wins but only narrowly in Auburn, Alabama’s probability drops. If the hypothetical one-loss Oregon or Utah struggles against an Oregon State or UCLA, Alabama’s probability rises. This is why it’s impossible to say with certainty that Alabama is “in” or “out” in a specific scenario.
What we can say is that from everything we know, Alabama is 41.8% likely to make the playoff at this point in time. That’s the fourth-best probability in the country, which implies that in the plurality of simulations, they face Ohio State in what I’d guess would be the Fiesta Bowl. We can’t know for certain where Alabama stands and will stand, but we’ll learn a lot about the first of those two things tomorrow night.
What does the win mean for Minnesota?
The Golden Gophers did it. After a kind-of-insulting ranking in last week’s inaugural check-in from the selection committee, Minnesota beat a top-five team in Penn State. Our model’s impressed. The Gophers’ playoff probability nearly tripled. It’s now…1.1%. And our model thinks they’ll only be ranked 15th this week, up just two spots from last week.
What’s holding them back?
Two things.
The first, and the one that more directly impacts the playoff probability, is that as of right now Minnesota’s a one or two-point underdog in two of their three remaining regular season games and would be a 20-point underdog against Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship. They might be undefeated, and they might stay undefeated, but nobody has to pretend that’s particularly likely. They’re having an historic year, and that should be celebrated, but: enjoy it for what it is, and that’s a Gopher skating across thin ice. Goldy might make it. It’s far more likely he doesn’t.
The second is that by putting Kansas State ahead of Minnesota last week, the committee told our model the former was getting a large benefit of the doubt and the latter was being punished for something, most likely their narrow early-season non-conference escapes and a weak overall schedule. That schedule got a little better this week, but when the committee released those rankings, our model had to accept that Minnesota was on the other side of what our model perceived as a large gap between Michigan and Notre Dame. The victory was enormous, and made an enormous impact upon their résumé, but that gap was also enormous, making the end result that Minnesota crossed the gap but didn’t’ go any farther.
Now, if the committee decides to erase their previous punishment of the Gophers and return them to the ranks of teams evaluated in line with the average historic precedent, our model says they’d be ranked eighth. Eliminate just half that punishment and they’re eleventh. This is why, when you look at the rankings below, you should pay a lot of attention to those numbers on the right. Minnesota may not have vaulted themselves into the top ten this weekend (though they also may have done so), but they almost definitely put themselves into a batch of about ten schools very tightly packed together.
What does the loss mean for Penn State?
All season, our model’s been high on Penn State’s path to the playoff as a one-loss non-conference champion. Rather than getting a chance to test that hypothesis, though, the whole theory’s up in flames, because Penn State’s 11-1 path to the playoff relied upon their one loss coming at Ohio State. Losing to Minnesota throws the chances of finishing 11-1 out the window. If Penn State ends the regular season with that record, they’re going to the Big Ten Championship, with the season’s new best overall victory under their belt.
This latter, conventional path to the playoff is still there: beat Ohio State, win the Big Ten. If Penn State does this, they’re in, in all conceivable likelihood. They do, though, have some additional paths, as indicated by our model placing their playoff probability at 16.9% despite their conference championship chances coming in at just 10.6%. This number will, of course, drop if our model is proved wrong in its guess that Penn State will remain ahead of Georgia, Oregon, and the rest, an assumption that isn’t guaranteed to be correct. It would be surprising if the committee decided a road loss to an undefeated team was that damaging, but it’s within the realm of possibility. Our model doesn’t know how close Georgia was to Clemson last week. It assumed the Dawgs received as little committee forgiveness as possible to make the rankings work. It could have been wrong. They could have received more.
So, as with the rest, we’ll learn a lot more about Penn State from this week’s rankings. But as with the rest, we still won’t learn everything.
Who benefits from the weekend?
Baylor, who we haven’t talked about yet today, benefits just from surviving the weekend. They’re in a similar position to Minnesota in that their current résumé has flaws despite lacking losses and their future projection includes losses, but they’re alive, and that counts.
Wisconsin’s path to a two-loss Big Ten Championship took a major hit when Minnesota won, as the Badgers now have to rely upon Iowa to give Minnesota the conference loss necessary for Wisconsin to have a shot at the Big Ten West. Ohio State’s national championship chances jumped on the back of Alabama’s diminished playoff likelihood, as did Clemson’s and Georgia’s. Oregon and Utah moved up by not losing. Oklahoma, as was implied, did themselves no favors by almost blowing a big lead.
Overall, the biggest climbers are LSU and Georgia. The aggregate ratings our model uses still think Alabama’s a slightly better team than LSU, which makes Georgia’s path to an SEC Championship slightly more manageable than it appeared Friday. This, combined with the Dawgs taking care of business against Mizzou, vaulted Georgia upwards in playoff probability. They did get passed by Oregon in our model’s expected rankings, but we’ll see if that holds, and either way, Georgia has bigger dragons ahead of it than the Ducks have in front of them, giving the Dawgs a major edge in upside.
Where will the rankings stand Tuesday?
We aren’t sure, but based on last week’s rankings, our model’s estimated “ranking formula” built off the last five seasons of final rankings from the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, and this week’s results, here’s where our model thinks things stand.
The number to the right reflects the distance our model places between teams in the rankings. This number is scaled such that the top-ranked team is at 100.0, and the bottom-ranked team in the whole FBS (UMass, at the moment) is at 0.0. Last week, the biggest readjustment our model made after rankings were released covered a 6.4-sized gap in this metric. In other words, expect each team’s ranking to be accurate within roughly 6.4 of the right-hand number.
1. Ohio State (100.0)
2. LSU (94.2)
3. Clemson (89.6)
4. Alabama (85.3)
5. Penn State (84.9)
6. Oregon (81.0)
7. Georgia (80.8)
8. Utah (79.9)
9. Florida (79.7)
10. Auburn (79.4)
11. Baylor (79.0)
12. Oklahoma (78.4)
13. Wisconsin (78.1)
14. Michigan (77.9)
15. Minnesota (77.2)
16. Notre Dame (76.6)
17. Cincinnati (73.7)
18. Kansas State (72.0)
19. Iowa (70.9)
20. Memphis (70.4)
21. Boise State (70.3)
22. Navy (69.6)
23. Oklahoma State (69.1)
24. Texas A&M (68.6)
25. SMU (68.6)
Who are the best teams?
Here’s how the aggregate ratings our model uses to predict games break down that question. The number on the right is the number of points by which they’d be expected to lose to the best team in the country on a neutral field.
1. Ohio State (0.0)
2. Alabama (5.8)
3. Clemson (6.9)
4. LSU (7.1)
5. Georgia (10.5)
6. Penn State (12.0)
7. Oklahoma (12.4)
8. Auburn (14.1)
9. Oregon (14.9)
10. Florida (14.9)
11. Utah (15.2)
12. Wisconsin (16.0)
13. Michigan (16.3)
14. Washington (18.9)
15. Notre Dame (19.9)
16. Minnesota (20.1)
17. Iowa State (20.6)
18. Iowa (20.7)
19. UCF (21.1)
20. Baylor (21.3)
21. Texas A&M (21.9)
22. Memphis (23.1)
23. Oklahoma State (24.0)
24. Texas (24.1)
25. USC (24.7)
26. Cincinnati (24.8)
27. Kansas State (25.5)
28. Indiana (25.6)
29. Navy (25.7)
30. Washington State (26.2)
31. TCU (26.3)
32. Miami (26.6)
33. Michigan State (27.3)
34. Missouri (27.7)
35. Appalachian State (28.0)
36. North Dakota State (28.1)
