College Football Top 25 10/3

Some goofy games yesterday really changed the college football landscape, or at least came awfully close to doing so (LSU and Tennessee). With the new games, here's a new top 25:

Rank	Team	W	L	Rating	SOS
1	Alabama	5	0	875.92	62.13
2	Oregon	5	0	712.38	49.22
3	Stanford	4	1	620.94	69.78
4	Iowa	4	1	598	57.46
5	Ohio State	5	0	567.82	38.71
6	Arizona	4	0	556.06	66.99
7	TCU	5	0	410.93	32.44
8	California	2	2	374.56	81.14
9	Boise St	4	0	296.42	30.59
10	Oklahoma St	4	0	292.36	49.36
11	Florida	4	1	263.23	79.81
12	Missouri	4	0	252.81	29.45
13	Nebraska	4	0	247.03	19.6
14	Miami FL	3	1	242.97	44.06
15	Utah	4	0	230.82	16.16
16	LSU	5	0	221.83	62.27
17	Texas A&M	3	1	216.75	36.79
18	Nevada	5	0	209.55	27.31
19	Kansas St	4	0	189.52	74.89
20	Arizona St	2	3	172.03	70.08
21	Arkansas	3	1	168.57	32.26
22	Virginia Tech	3	2	162.85	69.75
23	South Carolina	3	1	151.22	45.2
24	North Carolina St	4	1	147.13	44.79
25	Auburn	5	0	142.12	34.27

And a couple of other relevant teams:

46

Texas

3

2

74.85

45.71

48

Northwestern

5

0

69.67

20.76

70

Washington

2

2

40.64

60.26

424

Georgetown DC

3

2

0.517

0.658

What stands out about these ratings? First off, with Stanford's loss there's a new number one, Alabama. Strangely though, Stanford didn't drop very far, just down to third, despite a 21 point loss. How did that happen? Because the game was so high scoring, 21 points wasn't really that big of a victory (and for those who watched, the teams looked fairly even through 3 quarters).

Also an apparent bias of mine (I swear the program really puts this out) is having Iowa ranked 4th. Sure, they've had a couple of good games, but they lost to Arizona right? Turns out, that game was close enough for Iowa to still be ahead of Arizona.

As a whole in these rankings, record seems to play a small role. Northwestern is 5-0 and 48th, while 2-2 Cal is ranked 8th. That's actually a necessity when ranking 730 teams. Without that sort of stratification by schedule strength and score teams like Mount Union that go 13-0 in D3 end up atop rankings, despite clearly not being as good as FBS teams. This is a problem that will come up later when we look at the Colley rankings. For now we just have to accept that records don't matter as much right now as we sometimes think they do.