Last week, we talked about FPA:
Our college football model—which remains unpublished this year thanks to the uncertainty we’re about to talk through—has a variable in its ranking formula called FPA. If you read our college football stuff last year, you might remember it. FPA stands for “Forgiveness/Punishment Adjustment,” and we use it every week to calibrate our model to the committee’s rankings. In its essence, FPA is a metric for all the things the committee sees that the numbers don’t—some of which could be injuries or other circumstance, others of which are likely narratives, opinions, and other things that exist only in the mind.
We went on to talk about how high FPA was last week in total, across the top 25. We’re back, and it’s still high, but it’s lower—about 27% lower. This is substantial, but we’re still a long way from where we were at following last year’s final rankings. And while some of this is just how strange this season is (and therefore hard to compare against precedent), there are also some real head-scratchers from the committee:
- Georgia’s best victory, when adjusting for location and margin, is their 21-point handling of Auburn. That game took place in Athens, and Auburn is now unranked (the removal of a genuinely mediocre Auburn team from the rankings was responsible for a large chunk of the lowered FPA). They are ranked eighth, ahead of teams who have beaten Oklahoma State by 28, Iowa State by 17 in Ames, and Boise State by 34 on the blue turf.
- North Carolina is ranked despite having losses to Florida State and Virginia, who have combined to win four games against teams not named North Carolina.
- Coastal Carolina is ranked 18th despite having a 9-0 record with only one win coming by one possession, and that over the aforementioned team that beat Iowa State by 17 in Ames.
Some of this always happens. There are always head-scratchers. That’s fine. Reasonable people can disagree. We haven’t run the numbers on previous rankings to compare these oddities to past oddities. But it’s also fair to hold these people to account. Ranking teams isn’t that hard.
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The question du jour is whether Ohio State will be allowed into the playoff if they only end up 5-0 or 6-0. The answer, one would imagine, is yes, but let’s hammer home again that this is partially because the next teams in line are: A) a team that lost by 28 to the top-ranked team, B) a team that lost to the team that lost by 28 to the top-ranked team, and C) a Group of Five team. If the Group of Five team schedules another good team and wins convincingly. If the team-that-lost-to-the-28-point-losers beats the top-ranked team in the SEC Championship. If the 28-point-losers get one of those memory-wipers from Men in Black (or just get a wild amount of benefit of the doubt, which seems a real possibility). These are the things that would make it harder. Which means, in reality, that in the scenario in which Ohio State goes undefeated but doesn’t win the Big Ten, Florida is still probably their only real threat.
Still, don’t sleep on Notre Dame beating Clemson again, which would introduce a whole new dimension of uncertainty, and might actually be what we need for Cincinnati to make the field.
