The college football regular season is over. You can view the SRS ratings for each team here, and the single-game SRS ratings from each game involving an FBS team here. That list is sorted by the best single-game performances of the year, and Ohio State’s 59-0 thrashing of Wisconsin in the Big 10 Championship Game takes the top prize there. But today I thought it would be fun to go back and look at some of the most unusual performances of the year.

Biggest Upset: Northwestern State 30, Lousiana Tech 27

Northwestern State is an FCS school with a rating of just 23.7. Louisiana Tech is actually pretty good, finishing 8-5 and 37th in the SRS with a rating of 43.4. Given that the game was in Louisiana, we would put Northwestern State as 23-point underdogs, but on September 20th, they pulled the shocking upset. Although it was not the most noteworthy upset of the day, because….

Biggest Upset involving a Power 5 school: Indiana 31, Missouri 27

Missouri won the SEC East, although the Tigers were not a great team, finishing with a 48.9 SRS rating. Of course, Indiana is kind of terrible: the Hoosiers began the year 0-7 in Big Ten play before edging by Purdue in the season finale. Given that the game was in Columbia and that Indiana finished with a 31.4 SRS rating, Missouri should have won by 20.4 points. Instead, Indiana pulled the shocking upset, and gave SEC haters something to crow about.

The table below shows the 25 biggest upsets of the year: the Virginia Tech/Ohio State game slides into the top five, as does this year’s Bedlam game, which flew a bit under the radar given what else was going on in college football last week. For each team, I’ve listed their SRS rating and their opponent’s SRS rating, along with the difference between the two teams’ ratings after taking into account home field.

Biggest Outlier Game: Ohio State 59, Wisconsin 0

The Buckeyes finish the year with an SRS rating of 57.6, while the Badgers were a very respectable 49.7. ^[1]Note that this includes the results of this game, of course. Since that is an issue for all the games on the list, I didn’t bother with the extra leg work to recalculate the ratings excluding … Continue reading The game was at a neutral site, so we would have expected Ohio State to win by about 8 points. The only problem? The Buckeyes exceeded expectations by a whopping 51 points, the most by a team in any game this year.

The runner up? Alabama’s 59-0 win over Texas A&M. That game was not quite as much of an outlier, though, because of the larger spread between the two teams and the fact that the game was in Tuscaloosa. Here are the rest of the biggest outlier performances of the year:

Best Showing in a Losing Effort, Part I (Relative to Expectation)

Kansas is not very good at football: the Jayhawks finished the year with a 28.7 SRS rating. So when TCU came to Lawrence — the Horned Frogs have a rating of 60.5 — we would project a 28.8 point victory. Instead, Kansas kept it close, losing by just four points, or overexceeding our line by 24.8 points. That was the best performance in a losing effort relative to expectation. The second best involved the other Big 12 powerhouse two weeks later, when Baylor nearly lost to Texas Tech.

Best Showing in a Losing Effort, Part II (Overall)

What about the best games overall by a losing team? Baylor finished the year with an SRS rating of 57.4, and only three teams — Arizona (vs. Oregon), Auburn (vs. Ole Miss), and um, Virginia Tech (Ohio State) — won on the road against better teams. As a result, Baylor’s 3-point loss in Waco registers as one of the top performances for the year, even if it was in a loss.

Using the single-game ratings and the team SRS ratings, you can come up with your own categories, too. I’ll leave it at that for today.