FanPost

Re-ranking the top 15 by resume, statistically....sort of

Over the past few weeks I've spent quite a bit of time evaluating the College Football Playoff rankings in an effort to reverse engineer the thought process of the selection committee. The goal of course, has been to predict the Committee's decisions and with them the fate of our Bruins. The one thing that I've learned through four weeks of rankings is that resume is king. More so than the Associated Press voters or even the coaches, the Playoff Committee seems intent on rewarding those who have run the gauntlet (see: UCLA, Marshall and TCU/Baylor for evidence). So, with that thought in mind, I decided to try and quantify the resumes of some of the top teams. The following is a very rudimentary attempt at stat-based evaluation, apologies to Beer&Math amongst others, but here it goes anyway.

I, or more accurately Jeff Sagarin and his computers, assigned every team a ranking from 1st to 120th. For my purposes, any team that was ranked beyond 120th was essentially tied for 120th place as wins over those teams all count the same, which is to say, not at all. That being said, if a team were to beat the 119th ranked team, they would earn 1 point. A win over the 118th team would earn 2 points and so on. Just so I know we're on the same page, that means that a win over the #1 ranked team per Sagarin (Alabama, as of today) earns a squad 119 points. On the other side of the coin, a loss to Alabama is worth -1 point, a loss to the number #2 ranked team is worth -2 points and so on.

Using this simple formula, I determined the relative resume strength of each of the top 15 teams by finding the average points earned per game. Here are the results:

1 Alabama 68.9
2 Florida St 57.9
3 Oregon 57.2
4 UCLA 53.9
5 Georgia 52.0
6 TCU 51.2
7 Ole Miss 50.9
8 Miss St 49.4
9 Baylor 46.6
10 tOSU 45.1
11 ASU 40.4
12 K State 39.0
13 Arizona 36.7
14 Mich St 35.7
15 Wisconsin 23.9

Fun facts: we are the only team in the top 15 without a zero point win (i.e. everyone else has played a team ranked 120 or lower), the two worst losses both come from the Big10 (Wisconsin to Northwestern -59, tOSU to V Tech -79), Florida St and Georgia are the only two teams in the top 15 without a win of 100 points or better.

This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of BruinsNation's (BN) editors. It does reflect the views of this particular fan though, which is as important as the views of BN's editors.

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