With three weeks in the books, it’s time to unveil some college football ratings. This is part one — I plan to post Part II on Sunday afternoon.
It’s still too early to create meaningful SRS ratings, but there’s a workaround solution. You may recall that back in the summer, I created implied college football SRS ratings based on the Las Vegas spreads for 247 games. Those spreads were stale, but thanks to RJ Bell, founder of Pregame.com, I was able to get the final pre-game lines for those 247 games. I used those lines to build implied pre-season SRS ratings for 83 FBS teams, shown below:
Now, there are (incredibly) 125 teams at the FBS level in college football, and unfortunately, this doesn’t help us come up with ratings for the remaining 32 teams. However, in week one, half of those teams played one of the 83 teams for whom we have ratings (what this means is that the lines for these 21 games were posted after the 247 preseason lines were posted). This allows us to quickly generate ratings for these twenty-one teams, too. For example, Western Michigan was a 27.5 road underdog against Michigan State in week one. Since MSU was projected to be 1.9 points better than average, we can imply that WMU was projected to be 22.6 points worse than average. The table below shows these implied ratings:
That leaves 21 teams. Here’s my next fix: we can use their projected point spreads in week two (or their projected point spreads in week one, if their week two opponent now has a rating) to come up with ratings for 18 of those teams:
That leaves just three teams that we can’t come up with ratings for: Georgia State, who played FCS Samford and FCS Chattanooga, Tulane, who played FCS Jacksonville State and South Alabama, and South Alabama, who played FCS Southern Utah and Tulane). Oh well.
So for our 122 teams for whom we have ratings, now what? We add in the actual results through week three. But we need to wait for all the week three games to finish, me to take up in the morning, and run a few errands before I can run those numbers.
