Three College Football Top 25’s (Post-Week 9)

Apologies for the delays in this week’s outputs. Let’s look at some top 25’s. (Graphics should return next week.)

First, with the first CFP Rankings a week away, our model’s estimation of where the committee would currently have each team:

Oregon remains the oddity here, held back by our model because our model equally weights each week of the season. The Idaho game looks really, really bad to our model.

That said, on a scale from 0.0 to 100.0 encompassing the whole of the FBS, the model only has Oregon 3.1 points behind Miami, which is only a medium gap. At the end of last year, the average top 25 team was 3.7 points from where our model had them pegged.

What’s going on, in total, is that our model sees Miami consistently blowing teams out, Georgia/Indiana/Ohio State often blowing teams out, and Oregon only blowing teams out lately, and it gives the edge to those first four, plus BYU (whose win over Kansas State was, to our model, more impressive than anything any other undefeated has done this year, considering margin as well as opponent and location). I expect Oregon to be ranked first overall next Tuesday. Our model will then adjust and should be fine on the Ducks the rest of the season unless they start playing a lot worse. It does have these guys with the best average final ranking in the country at the end of all its simulations, which illustrates how little this Oregon slight matters.

Trawling the list, the only other notable oddity I see is Louisville. What’s happening there? All three of their losses came to one-loss or undefeated teams, and each was close. Again, our model is wrong here. I doubt the committee would rank Louisville. But if Louisville weren’t about to play Clemson and settle this, our model would adjust next week. That’s how the model works.

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Moving on to WAB, Wins Above Bubble, the college basketball-originated metric which doesn’t care about margin of victory:

Texas A&M jumps here, and a few other teams pass Texas, and LSU naturally drops. Aside from that, though, and UL Monroe dropping out following their second loss of the year (ULM’s previous only loss came at Texas, a game an average bubble team wouldn’t be expected to win), there isn’t a lot of movement this week. Memphis moves in to replace ULM. The Tigers are 7–1 overall, and their loss at Navy was disappointing to WAB (which bases its measurements on Movelor), but their schedule is among the better schedules for 7–1 teams.

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Last, Movelor’s top 25. This is our model’s power rating, its prediction of how good teams will be in their next game:

We’ve got a new number 1, with Oregon and a host of others leapfrogging Ohio State and Texas after each underwhelmed against an opponent Movelor expected them to beat badly. Is Oregon the best team in the country, then? Right now, in an average expected performance, Movelor thinks so. It’s worth noting, though, that the top six teams on this list are within a field goal of one another. It’s also worth noting that this is very much a prediction of where things stand this week. We’ve written elsewhere about our questions regarding Oregon’s depth and preparation for a 16-game slate, and we’ll continue to ask those questions.

In other notable movement, Michigan continues to slide, but they at least slowed their descent this week. Movelor only seems to be about six points higher on Michigan than betting markets right now. That gap continues to narrow, and this particular black eye for our model continues to thankfully fade. I would estimate that we’re two or three weeks away from general agreement on the Wolverines.

Movelor seems to be about even with betting markets now when it comes to Indiana, though I’m not sure how betting markets are thinking about the Kurtis Rourke/Tayven Jackson gap. That’s another one we wish Movelor had adapted to sooner.

Our third big black eye was Washington, but they’re thankfully out of the top 25 now. In their place (and in place of Missouri and Wisconsin), Virginia Tech, Boise State, and Oklahoma rise into the top 25. Oklahoma’s presence might raise some eyebrows, but the Sooners have hung with both Tennessee and Mississippi, and they still have all that talent. They played better this week, and Movelor respects that. Shoutouts to Virginia Tech and Boise State as well. The former has really turned it around after a terrible and then painful start to the year, and the latter keeps doing its thing. I believe we’ve already shouted out South Carolina and Florida, but the message persists: Each is playing well right now. 16 or 17 points worse than Oregon, but well.