Week 1 Rankings

Hey football fans! My week 1 schedule was a little screwed up because there were games from Thursday to Saturday but hopefully I’ll post the rankings on Sunday night for the rest of the season.

                     

Week 1 was mostly comprised of one-sided matchups with a few good match-ups sprinkled in (Alabama over VA Tech, Clemson over Georgia, LSU over TCU, Washington over Boise State) but my favorite week 1 tradition are the inevitable FCS over FBS upsets. Every year, FBS teams pay gobs of money to kick the crap out of a hapless FCS opponent in week 1. Unfortunately, their FCS opponents don’t always get the message, resulting in embarrassing losses for the home team. This year’s honor roll includes the following:

·         Towson over Connecticut, 33 – 18

·         Samford over Georgia State, 31 – 21

·         North Dakota State over Kansas State, 24 – 21

·         McNeese State over South Florida, 53 – 21

·         Eastern Illinois over San Diego State, 40 – 19

·         UNI over Iowa State, 28 – 20

Here are the updated top 10 after week 1:

Rank	Team	Rating	Record	SOS1	SOS2	E(FR)	P(WARG)
1	Alabama	29.0	1-0	3.4	0.112	10.9 – 1.1	0.212
2	Oregon	26.7	1-0	4.8	0.130	10.6 – 1.4	0.134
3	Florida State	26.0	1-0	-0.5	0.221	10.9 – 1.1	0.218
4	LSU	24.6	1-0	7.5	0.025	9.5 – 2.5	0.018
5	Texas	23.0	1-0	6.9	0.093	9.6 – 2.4	0.053
6	Georgia	22.2	0-1	9.2	0.044	8.3 – 3.7	0.012
7	Stanford	22.1	0-0	6.9	0.112	9.6 – 2.4	0.035
8	Oklahoma State	22.0	1-0	4.6	0.127	10.1 – 1.9	0.085
9	Oklahoma	21.9	1-0	6.5	0.077	9.4 – 2.6	0.030
10	South Carolina	20.9	1-0	8.6	0.075	9.2 – 2.8	0.007

Not much has changed since last week; the prior has a lot of weight early in the season (which limits wild swings in the rankings) but game results will start to overwhelm the prior over the next couple of weeks.

Here are the top 10 teams with the best chance of finishing undefeated:

P(WARG) Rank	Rank	Team	P(WARG)
1	15	Louisville	0.344
2	3	Florida State	0.218
3	1	Alabama	0.212
4	36	Fresno State	0.206
5	2	Oregon	0.134
6	32	Cincinnati	0.092
7	8	Oklahoma State	0.085
8	5	Texas	0.053
9	11	Michigan	0.053
10	63	Northern Illinois	0.038

Louisville still has the best chance of running the table and substantially improved their chances after a strong week 1 showing. The big change, though, is that the teams at the top of the rankings (Alabama, Oregon and Florida State) created some separation and now appear to be better bets to finish undefeated. Finally, 63^rd ranked Northern Illinois is  the 10^th most likely team to finish undefeated. They defeated Iowa in week 1 (projected to be the best team on their schedule) and only face a very weak MAC schedule and a game against an average Purdue squad over the remainder of the season.

As always, full rankings can be found at my faculty webpage:

https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/koopm007/statistics-in-sports/college-football-rankings.

Enjoy week 2!