I’ll be honest: I know nothing about FCS football. But that’s what the SRS is for! If you want to read a real FCS playoff preview, SB Nation has a good one, as does the Sports Network, but let’s be honest, I have no idea how good those previews are. If you were to tell me that SB Nation just made up the name “Terrence West”, I couldn’t offer a counterargument.
That said, here is what the SRS says about the first round of the playoffs. Here’s how to read the table below: South Dakota State has an SRS rating of 30.1, the 8th best among FCS schools. In the first round of the playoffs, they go on the road to face Northern Arizona, which has an SRS rating of 23.5, the 27th best school in the FCS. As a result, the projected Margin of Victory – always shown from the perspective of the home team, is 3.6 points in the favor of the visitors. The table is sorted in terms of Game Quality, in case you need to determine which one of these games to watch. Game Quality is a proprietary statistic which meas… nah, even I’m not that crazy. The Game Quality rank is just a combination of the average SRS ratings of the two teams and the projected competitiveness of the game.
