Sunday, December 5, 2010

College Football Top 25 12/5

There weren't many games this weekend, but the few that happened were big ones. Conference championships and rivalry games are often ripe with upsets, but not this weekend. Auburn impressed in their victory over South Carolina, but other than that things stayed roughly the same. Here's the Top 25:

Rank Team W L Rating
1 Stanford 11 1 636.37
2 Oregon 12 0 542.97
3 Boise St 11 1 525.48
4 TCU 12 0 461.33
5 Ohio State 11 1 395.29
6 Alabama 9 3 340.22
7 Auburn 13 0 274.84
8 Oklahoma 11 2 270.74
9 Missouri 10 2 236.33
10 Virginia Tech 11 2 216.21
11 Nebraska 10 3 212.35
12 Arkansas 10 2 209.14
13 Oklahoma St 10 2 206.51
14 Texas A&M 9 3 189.93
15 Florida St 9 4 183.7
16 Wisconsin 11 1 172.48
17 South Carolina 9 4 170.41
18 Arizona 7 5 165.38
19 LSU 10 2 162.8
20 Arizona St 6 6 150.12
21 Nevada 12 1 149.05
22 Iowa 7 5 148.86
23 Southern Cal 8 5 136.31
24 West Virginia 9 3 133.95
25 Florida 7 5 131.44

Auburn managed to jump a couple spots up to 7th in the rankings. Why are they only 7th still? Their multiple close games against teams early in the season still weigh them down, and point to a possible flaw in these rankings: teams are assumed to have the same level of talent throughout the season. Auburn on the other hand appears to have improved significantly as we got farther into the season (although I still don't think they're on the level of teams like Oregon and Stanford). We'll find out in the championship game between the Ducks and the Tigers, only a month away.

I'd also like to point out that Connecticut, which is in a BCS bowl, is ranked 59th. Maybe it's time to get rid of automatic qualifiers.

3 comments:

  1. I have problems with ranking teams with poor early season SOS being highly ranked, in many cases above teams that have been battle tested.

    In mens basketball, you have Arizona ranked #5 having played powderpuffs and losing to Kansas. How in the world is AZ ranked above a K state with the same win/loss record and a much tougher SOS?

    ON Saturday BYU will expose them as a young team that will be towards the end of the season, but Az is not there yet and should not be a top 25 team yet.

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  2. The reason that teams like Arizona are up there is because this is a predictive system. The goal is not to reward teams for their performance but to predict which teams will do well going forward. One great example of this was Georgetown losing to Temple tonight. All the rewarding systems like RPI had Georgetown as one of the few best teams in the country, but my system with a 60% home court advantage for Temple gave the Owls a slightly better chance of winning. And they won, with a victory for predictive systems.

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  3. Austin

    Thanks for the explaination. Time to move BYU way up....I have looking for any weakness in their game and I guess I will have to wait til the UNLV game to see how they handle true aggression and good coaching. That Jimmer Fredette is something special. He eats defenses up and stretches the court to get wide open shots for his teammates. I'll be watching.

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