Week 5 Rankings

Hey college football fans! I apologize for not posting the rankings last week. It turns out that work + a 3 month old = a very busy Joe. I’ll do my best to get these up earlier starting next week.

What have we learned in the last two weeks? Quite a bit, actually. Alabama and Oregon are awesome, Boise State is very good but no one cares because they play in the WAC, Florida doesn’t know how to play offense, Texas and USC aren’t very good this year and Les Miles is still Les Miles. Exciting stuff, huh?

The rankings haven’t changed much over the last two weeks. Oregon is still number 1, followed by Alabama and Boise State. Ohio State and TCU switched places and are now ranked numbers 4 and 5, respectively. Miami (#6) and Iowa (#8) are the only teams to move into the top 10 due to good performances after early losses, while Nebraska and LSU dropped out of the top 10. Nebraska was hurt by a very mediocre performance in a victory over the South Dakota State Jackrabbits and LSU has the notable handicap of being coached by Les Miles. Rounding out the top 10 are Stanford, Florida and Oklahoma.

Here are the top 15 teams ranked by the probability that they go undefeated:

P(WARG)* Rank	Rank	Team	P(WARG)*
1	3	Boise State	0.787
2	1	Oregon	0.599
3	5	TCU	0.506
4	2	Alabama	0.369
5	4	Ohio State	0.270
6	11	Nebraska	0.096
7	16	Utah	0.074
8	10	Oklahoma	0.066
9	30	Nevada	0.037
10	33	Michigan State	0.012
11	22	Missouri	0.011
12	12	LSU	0.006
13	27	Oklahoma State	0.006
14	15	Arizona	0.005
15	20	Auburn	0.005

* P(WARG) = Probability of Winning All Remaining Games.

Not much changed here. Boise State, Oregon and TCU are all in good shape to go undefeated. Although, any chance that Boise State and TCU would play for the national title ahead of an undefeated team from a BCS conference were put to rest when the pollsters jumped Oregon ahead of Boise State over the weekend. The only meaningful change in the last two weeks is that Alabama cleared two meaningful hurdles in Florida and Arkansas and now have a much better chance of going undefeated. Alabama is still likely to get tripped up along with way with games against South Carolina, LSU, Auburn and the SEC championship game but beating Arkansas and Florida was a good start.   

Full week 5 rankings can be found at my personal website:

www.biostat.umn.edu/~josephk/wk5_ranking_report.pdf