Eight weeks are down. We’re more than halfway through the season. The first CFP Top 25 is two weeks away.
Let’s look at the top 25, using three different lenses.
The first we’ll use today is, again, Wins Above Bubble. This is a college basketball metric popularized (at least to us) by Seth Burn and Bart Torvik. The concept is that it measures how many more or fewer games each team has won relative to what we’d expect from a team on the playoff bubble. Effectively: How have you done against your schedule, and how would Movelor—our college football model’s rating system—expect its tenth-ranked team (Clemson) to do against that same schedule?
The first notable thing here is that Georgia, who has lost one game (and lost it to what’s now a two-loss team) still boasts the most impressive set of accomplishments in the country. Winning at Texas is a big deal. Beating Clemson is a big deal. Beating Kentucky on the road was not a small deal. The Alabama loss, again a road game? Not a huge demerit. Georgia, by a reasonable metric, has the most impressive résumé in the country.
After that, it’s undefeateds until we get to Texas, who still edges Indiana and Pitt even having lost to the Bulldogs last night. Texas’s schedule has started to take some heat, and some of this is Movelor being a bit too high still on Michigan (more on that below), but Texas’s résumé is not unimpressive, and that’s even before you consider scoring margin and other indicators.
There isn’t a whole lot to note after that. Notre Dame’s into the top 25 after missing it last week, Alabama’s still in the top 25 even with the second loss, Boise State is not in it but that’s not surprising. Louisiana Monroe’s standing is still fun.
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Moving on, our model has a formula which forecasts where the CFP committee itself would rank different teams if it were ranking teams right now. This is the same formula our model uses once the CFP committee is ranking teams in order to get a read on how the committee is interpreting different teams’ résumés to date. It’s valuable because the committee tends to be less horse race-adjacent than the AP. Here’s where it thinks the committee would have the top 25 right now:
The issue with these, of course, is that if Ohio State and Oregon were next to one another, the committee would flip them. But from a formulaic approach, what stands out is how tightly packed the field is after Texas went down. The number on the right-hand side pegs the top-ranked team at 100.0 and the hypothetical 134th-ranked team at 0.0. Last week, no one was within six percentage points of Texas. This week, seven teams are within six percentage points at the top.
Also of note:
- Indiana’s been beating teams as badly as a team like Ohio State does. That generally plays in the rankings. Would it for Indiana, or would the committee punish them for “schedule” concerns which wouldn’t exist for Ohio State, Georgia, or Alabama?
- Georgia’s performance to date shows up here as well. So too does Ohio State’s, though, which gets back to the benefits of winning big and losing close. You can beat good teams or you can beat bad teams by a lot. Beat the bad teams by enough, and things even out for you. IF the committee doesn’t buck its own precedent.
- Penn State comes in ahead of only Iowa State and Pitt among the power conference undefeateds. The Nittany Lions both have (Illinois/USC) and haven’t (USC/Illinois) proved themselves, depending whether you worry more about a team being good or a team being accomplished. Work to do there.
- Boise State isn’t all that far ahead of Army and Navy. Washington State being a ranked win, though, as it is in this top 25, would be helpful to the Broncos’ cause. So too would a higher committee impression of Oregon, whom the model isn’t particularly high on thanks in part to the weak showing against Idaho.
- I hate the in-season AP poll more than possibly anybody, but I will say: Aside from Vanderbilt, today’s AP Top 25 does match this list, and the AP has Washington State 26th. There are a lot of differences within it, but the AP isn’t doing anything phenomenally stupid at the moment. Credit to those voters.
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Finally, the 25 best teams in the country, in Movelor’s eyes:
The big issue here is Michigan. Movelor will only drop teams so far at once, and I personally don’t think it’s caught up to Michigan’s impotence just yet, even having dropped the Wolverines’s rating more than 16 points since the start of this year and even more since the end of last year. I’m also skeptical that it’s caught up to Washington (they’re probably worse than this) and Indiana (they’re probably better). Thankfully for Indiana, this should mean Movelor will give the Hoosiers more credit than they deserve next weekend for whatever that result turns out to be.
It’s interesting to see Georgia only fourth, but we should remember that this is about how a team should be expected to play in an average week. Maybe they flipped the switch last night. Maybe Texas isn’t that good, and Movelor’s too high on the Longhorns. If the Florida/Georgia game was happening next week, a 15-point line wouldn’t surprise me. That’s roughly where Movelor currently has it, and accurately projecting average games is what Movelor’s built to do.
Speaking of Florida, they’re a noteworthy name here, as is South Carolina. Being the eighth or tenth-best team in your conference isn’t a lot of fun, but if it translates to 18th and 20th-best in the country? Our model still doesn’t project Florida to make a bowl game, but at 4–3, all they need to do is upset one of Georgia, Texas, LSU, and Mississippi, then take care of business against Florida State. It’s not impossible after yesterday. South Carolina doesn’t share these concerns. The Gamecocks should make a bowl game unless they really drop the ball down the stretch.
Is Notre Dame the fifth-best team nationally? I would guess…no? But SP+ has them eighth, FPI has them seventh, and while betting markets continue to doubt the Irish, Notre Dame has now covered the spread in five of their seven games. I’d personally bet against them in a game against Alabama at even odds, but this rating isn’t the craziest thing in the world.
One more name to note: Wisconsin at 25th. Things looked very bleak for the Badgers less than a month ago. They were 2–2 and their wins had come by 14 points apiece against Western Michigan and South Dakota. Now, they’re 5–2, they’ve held Purdue, Rutgers, and Northwestern to a combined 16 points, and while that’s Purdue, Rutgers, and Northwestern, it’s also a combined 16 points.
