College Football Top 25 1/12/11

It's done, the college football season is over. Auburn has deservedly been crowned the champion, they had the most successful season. But were they really the best team? Here's the (final!) top 25:

Rank	Team	W	L	Rating	SOS
1	Stanford	12	1	698.05	81.39
2	Boise St	12	1	508.5	32.57
3	Oregon	12	1	502.72	65.71
4	Alabama	10	3	424.76	58.41
5	TCU	13	0	412.31	27.65
6	Ohio State	12	1	355.73	38.97
7	Auburn	14	0	301.63	77.89
8	Oklahoma	12	2	256.26	67.97
9	Oklahoma St	11	2	228.26	50.36
10	Arkansas	10	3	216.93	64.83
11	Missouri	10	3	205.73	51.61
12	Florida St	10	4	191.02	62.13
13	Virginia Tech	11	3	188.91	55.09
14	LSU	11	2	187.6	66.13
15	South Carolina	9	5	166.64	79.45
16	Wisconsin	11	2	165.59	36.32
17	Nebraska	10	4	165.05	48.58
18	Texas A&M	9	4	158.54	68.72
19	Arizona St	6	6	147.93	78.55
20	Iowa	8	5	140.17	42.58
21	Florida	8	5	139.14	67.7
22	Arizona	7	6	137.38	80
23	Nevada	13	1	134.05	25.82
24	Southern Cal	8	5	131.54	91.19
25	Notre Dame	8	5	124.99	65.45

Stanford is still at number 1! Yup, it was true in the very first ranking, and it still is. In a special year for the Cardinal they were the best team in the nation, even if an unfortunate loss to Oregon derailed their title hopes. It's easy be skeptical (some might find some supposed bias up top, I swear there isn't any) but the results speak for themselves. The rankings system got 23 of 35 bowl games right (22.5 was predicted) and had 442 (437 expected) points on ESPN bowl mania (good for the 98th percentile).

The Bowl's are nice and all, but over Thanksgiving I proposed a playoff system, which if it had played out would've given us a very different result:

Seed	Team	Win%
1	Auburn	14.8
2	Oregon	29.3
3	TCU	11.4
4	Stanford	34.3
5	Wisconsin	1.8
6	Ohio State	8.4

Auburn would still have a chance of winning, but the most likely champion would be: The Stanford Cardinal! Okay, so you don't believe me, but it sure would be interesting to find out. Maybe next year (Mark Cuban). For now, all we can do is congratulate Auburn for over coming the odds and winning the National Championship.