Week 6 Rankings

Hey football fans!

Week 6 was a huge weekend of college football! Stanford won the game of the week with a close victory over Washington, while Ohio State picked up a big win over Northwestern. Elsewhere, Florida State continued to look impressive with a 63-0 victory over Maryland. Not to be outdone, Baylor racked up 864 yards of total offense in a 73-42 victory over West Virginia in a game that wasn’t as close as the score would indicate – seriously.

Here are the updated top 10 after week 6:

Rank	Team	Rating	Record	SOS1	SOS2	E(FR)	P(WARG)
1	Oregon	34.5	5 – 0	4.5	0.12	11.4 – 0.6	0.46
2	Florida State	32.7	5 – 0	0.1	0.14	11.3 – 0.7	0.41
3	Baylor	26.5	4 – 0	0.7	0.23	10.9 – 0.1	0.29
4	Clemson	25.2	5 – 0	2.3	0.12	10.8 – 1.2	0.16
5	LSU	24.6	5 – 1	5.8	0.05	9.6 – 2.4	0.13
6	Alabama	24.5	5 – 0	2.5	0.14	10.9 – 1.1	0.18
7	Louisville	21.4	5 – 0	-7.9	0.77	11.7 – 0.3	0.73
8	Stanford	21.3	5 – 0	8.0	0.07	9.9 – 2.1	0.03
9	Georgia	20.9	4 – 1	8.7	0.05	9.4 – 2.6	0.05
10	Washington	20.9	4 – 1	6.6	0.04	8.9 – 3.1	0.04

The biggest story in the top 10 is that Alabama continues to drop and is now ranked #
6. This would be viewed as almost heretical by the mainstream press but I’m not sure why? Every week, more articles are written about how Alabama doesn’t look as impressive as expected, while Oregon, Florida State and Baylor have yet to play competitive football games. Meanwhile, Alabama is the near unanimous #1 and Baylor is ranked #15(!) in both major media polls. One of the biggest criticisms of the major polls is that they are too dependent on pre-season rankings and this is why. My prior is based on the same pre-season rankings that had Alabama #1 but the data now overwhelm the prior and suggest that Alabama is not the best team in the country (not even close, apparently). It would be nice if the polls exhibited the same fluidity – especially early in the season.

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

P(WARG) Rank	Rank	Team	P(WARG)
1	7	Louisville	0.725
2	1	Oregon	0.460
3	2	Florida State	0.407
4	11	Ohio State	0.291
5	3	Baylor	0.290
6	6	Alabama	0.183
7	43	Fresno State	0.178
8	4	Clemson	0.157
9	65	Northern Illinois	0.132
10	8	Stanford	0.034

Alabama is the story here, as well. The probability that they finish undefeated dropped about 10% even though they won. What gives? First, there was essentially no chance that Alabama would lose to Georgia State, so the Tide’s win on Saturday didn’t play a factor one way or the other. Second, and more importantly, LSU is now ranked slightly ahead of Alabama and it now appears that LSU will give Alabama one heck of a game when they play in November. Elsewhere, Ohio State increased their chances of finishing undefeated by about 10% after their victory over Northwestern.

My alma mater (or, at least, one of my alma maters), the University of Washington has the game of the week for two weeks in a row! Unfortunately, the Huskies are underdogs for the second week in a row and, this time, they’re about a 10-point underdog compared to a 3-point underdog against Stanford.  If that doesn’t interest you, there are four other top-25 matchups on the schedule this weekend. Here is a run-down:

• #1 (in my rankings) Oregon @ #10 Washington, Oregon favored by 10.4, 78% chance of winning
• #12 Florida @ #5 LSU, LSU favored by 8.8, 74% chance of winning
• #16 Missouri @ #9 Georgia, Georgia favored by 6.6, 69% chance of winning 
• #17 Texas A&M @ #24 Mississippi, Texas A&M favored by 0.3, 51% chance of winning 
• #23 TCU @ #20 Oklahoma State, Oklahoma State favored by 3.7, 61% chance of winning 

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 the week 7!