There are a lot of ways to rank college football teams. You can rank them based on how good they are. You can rank them based on how strong their résumés are. You can rank them based on how recently they made you notice them doing something good or bad. There are more categories beyond these, and within most of them, there are various reasonable approaches to the task.
One of our favorite college basketball tools for measuring résumé is Wins Above Bubble, a metric popularized (at least to us) by Seth Burn and Bart Torvik. The idea behind WAB is to measure how much better or worse a hypothetical average bubble team’s record would be against every team’s schedule. In WAB, margin of victory/defeat doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter which teams you specifically beat. All that matters is how many games you win and lose and the strength of your schedule. It’s a very raw way to measure accomplishment.
Following last night’s games, we measured WAB for every FBS team, using Movelor’s ratings as the basis for what the “hypothetical average bubble team” (we used the tenth-best Movelor rating for this) would do against each schedule. Here’s the top 25 it yielded:
You can think of this as a simple, mathematical measure of the 25 most deserving teams in the country. Miami has overperformed a playoff bubble team by 0.52 wins. SMU has underperformed an average playoff bubble team by 0.43 wins. Are there oddities? Yes. It’s strange to see Louisiana Monroe as the 14th-most deserving team. But the Warhawks have only lost to Texas, that game was in Austin, they’ve beaten JMU, and they’re 3–0 in what’s narrowly the toughest mid-major conference in the country. An average CFP bubble team would have a similar chance of going 5–1 against Louisiana Monroe’s schedule so far as it would against Ohio State’s. Louisiana Monroe is, objectively, just as accomplished so far this year as the Buckeyes, and more accomplished than Alabama, Boise State, Clemson, Tennessee, and a host of others (Notre Dame isn’t even in the WAB Top 25 right now, despite that win in College Station.)
Other takeaways from this list:
- Georgia’s played a tough schedule so far, with that Clemson game sometimes overlooked even as it becomes a stronger win by the week.
- Liberty’s played the easiest schedule among undefeated teams (no surprise there). Indiana’s played the easiest schedule among undefeated power conference teams (again, no surprise).
- Oklahoma’s schedule is tough enough to make them the only two-loss team on this list, unless I’m really missing something as I look at it.
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Another way to measure the top 25 is how the College Football Playoff committee does it. Our model has a formula which approximates the CFP committee’s rankings. It’s imperfect, but it’s very close annually. We’ll show you what it says, but first, a caveat:
There’s a reason the committee doesn’t start ranking teams until November.
Ok. Brace yourselves.
That number to the right of every team is where the formula has said team rated within the FBS, with 100.0 the top-rated team and 0.0 the bottom-rated team.
What’s going on with Oregon?
Well, if the committee were to be perfectly consistent year over year, it wouldn’t view the Ducks’ ten-point win over Idaho very kindly. Our formula cares a lot about margin of victory. That tends to be a very predictive tool. Between the Idaho game and even the Boise State game (a ranked win here, but only by three points and played at home), the formula expects narrow victories to hold the Ducks back. This isn’t a big concern for Oregon overall—our model, which uses this formula, still has them finishing the season ranked sixth in its average simulation, and in its average simulation Oregon does not win the Big Ten title—but that’s what’s going on. It’s unfair to the Ducks that the committee will probably view Idaho the same as any other FCS team, but it’s unfair to everybody else that the committee won’t weight that game the same as it weights even Oregon vs. Oregon State.
Besides Oregon, there isn’t much to be note here, honestly. Boise State should be encouraged, as narrative might matter to the committee, the Broncos’ narrative perception is through the roof, and they’re already showing up in this narrative-less top 25. Pitt’s method of achieving its so-far undefeated record isn’t the sort that’s conducive to a high ranking, but the Panthers are still closer to being ranked third than Miami is to being ranked first. Seeing BYU and Indiana ahead of Penn State should raise eyebrows, but our formula doesn’t give any brand name subsidies, a practice which holds up well over time (less so in college basketball, interestingly enough). Overall? Besides Oregon, it’s a pretty normal list, and if you’re an AP voter and you were to submit this, you’d probably take less heat than if you went with the more logically consistent WAB.
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One more. This is just where Movelor, our model’s rating system, has the top 25:
We’ve talked plenty about how Movelor’s cautious approach probably isn’t serving it all that well with regard to Michigan. I don’t think Michigan’s the 12th-best team in the country, and I’ve already done some work on fixing that Movelor shortcoming for next year. There’s nothing else on here, though, which really makes me wince. Movelor would have Ohio State a 0.4-point favorite in a rematch played next weekend in Eugene. It has Texas as a 9.9-point favorite this week against Georgia in Austin. You can argue that the Texas/Georgia spread should be closer, but Movelor’s going off of what the teams have shown us. Georgia’s been playing comparable football to a team who lost to NIU. If Texas was a 10-point favorite over Notre Dame, no one would bat an eye.
