Week 8 Rankings

Hey football fans!

Last weekend brought us the first major shakeup of the college football season thanks to Texas Tech, who upset Oklahoma 41-38, and Michigan State, who upset Wisconsin 37-31. Elsewhere, Alabama, LSU, Oklahoma State and Stanford continued to roll, Clemson and Kansas State continued to prove me wrong and Boise State had an unexpected close game against Air Force.  My updated top 10 can be found below:

Rank	Team	Rating	Record	SOS1	SOS2	E(FR)	P(WARG)
1	Alabama	30.5	8-0	1.8	0.13	11.4-0.6	0.41
2	LSU	30.1	8-0	5.2	0.04	11.3-0.7	0.30
3	Stanford	28.5	7-0	2.2	0.20	11.2-0.8	0.30
4	Oregon	28.2	6-1	4.3	0.05	10.2-1.8	0.27
5	Oklahoma	26.3	6-1	5.7	0.09	10.0-2.0	0.28
6	Boise State	24.9	7-0	-5.4	0.45	11.7-0.3	0.76
7	Wisconsin	24.2	6-1	-3.0	0.32	10.4-1.6	0.40
8	Oklahoma State	23.9	7-0	5.3	0.11	11.2-0.8	0.34
9	Texas A&M	19.3	5-2	5.8	0.08	8.5-3.5	0.10
10	Florida State	17.9	4-3	0.51	0.21	8.1-3.9	0.33

Oklahoma dropped 3 spots in the rankings and saw their rating drop by over 3 points thanks to their loss to Texas Tech. In contrast, Wisconsin remains at number 7 after their loss to Michigan State, although, their rating did drop a point and a half. This may come as a bit of a surprise but Michigan State is a solid team, as compared to Texas Tech, who is very mediocre. Finally, Notre Dame dropped out of the top 10 after losing at home to USC and were replaced by Florida State.

Here are the top 14 teams from the initial BCS rankings along with the probability that they win all of their remaining games:

BCS Rank	Rank	Team	P(WARG)
1	2	LSU	0.299
2	1	Alabama	0.413
3	8	Oklahoma State	0.339
4	6	Boise State	0.758
5	21	Clemson	0.074
6	3	Stanford	0.297
7	4	Oregon	0.271
8	38	Kansas State	0.001
9	5	Oklahoma	0.281
10	17	Arkansas	0.021
11	16	Michigan State	0.103
12	23	Virginia Tech	0.162
13	15	South Carolina	0.044
14	26	Nebraska	0.020

Oklahoma State certainly benefitted from the two big upsets of the weekend but, in my opinion, the big winner was Stanford. Yes, Oklahoma State moved up to number 3 but they were always going to play for the national title as long as they went undefeated. In that sense, nothing has changed since last week. On the other hand, Stanford needed a lot of help even if they went undefeated. It’s now a lot less likely that the Big 12 champ will finish the season undefeated and the Tree no longer have to worry about how they stack up against Wisconsin. They still need some help but the path to the BCS title game looks a lot clearer this week than it did a week ago.

Alabama and LSU have off this week leading up to their battle royale on November 5. Among the national title contenders, Oklahoma State plays a potentially tricky game against Baylor, while Stanford plays an underrated USC team coming off a big victory against Notre Dame. Finally, two undefeated teams that have not impressed the rankings, Clemson and Kansas State, face tough tests in Georgia Tech and Oklahoma, respectively.

As always, the full ranking can be found at my personal website: www.biostat.umn.edu/~josephk/wk8_rankings_2011.pdf