Yesterday, I published the implied SRS ratings from the Vegas point spreads produced last week. Today, I want to publish the weekly point spreads, along with some notes.

With 240 games involved, each team’s rating gets generated by looking at the point spread in their game and the point spreads in all other games by them, and the point spreads in all other games by their opponent, and the games for their opponent’s opponents, and so on. For the most part, the results match up pretty well. For example, in week 7, Houston is a 4-point road underdog in Indianapolis, and in week 11, the Texans are a 2-point home favorite against the Colts. The Steelers are 9-point home favorites against Cincinnati in week 4, and Pittsburgh is a 3-point road favorite against the Bengals in week 12.

For the most part, after we have derived each team’s rating, the point spreads then make a lot of sense. Pittsburgh has an SRS of +1.5 and Cincinnati has an SRS of -4.3, so it makes perfect sense that the Steelers would be 9-point home favorites and 3-point road favorites against the Bengals. But there are two games that don’t make much sense.

In week 8, the Bengals are facing the Rams in London. Los Angeles has an SRS rating of +5.4, making them 9.8 points better than Cincinnati. And if anything, home field should favor Cincinnati, as this is a really far trip for LA. And yet the Rams are 13-point favorites! In addition, the Seahawks have an SRS rating of +1.9, while the Falcons have an SRS rating of +0.4. All else being equal, the Seahawks should be 1.5 point favorites on a neutral field and 1.5-point dogs on the road. And yet when Seattle flies cross country to Atlanta, it is the Seahawks that are 1.5-point favorites. Weird.

Other than those games, all other point spreads are within 2 points of what we would project based on the SRS ratings of the two teams and the location of the game. This is why you don’t really need many games to come up with implied SRS ratings: for the most part, Vegas uses their team ratings to set lines, and the transitive property is applicable here (and matchup strengths are not).

Below are the point spreads for every game this season. Here’s how to read the table, which is fully sortable and searchable. Arizona has an SRS rating of -5.8, and in week 1, hosts Detroit who has an SOS of -3.3. The point spread in that game is a pick’em, and based on that point spread, the expected MOV is the Lions by 3 points. [continue reading…]

After the release of the 2019 Schedule, the next big item on the agenda is figuring out who are the best and worst teams in the NFL. Every year, CG Technology releases point spreads for each of the first 240 games of the NFL season (i.e., spreads for every game during each of the first 16 weeks). And, every year, I then use those weekly ratings to derive the Vegas ratings are for each team. Hence the title of today’s post: we can use the Vegas point spreads in each game to derive the implied ratings by CG Technology for each team.

The way to do this is to take the point spread in each game, adjust for home field (except for the five international games), and then determine by how many points Vegas thinks Team A is better than Team B. For example, when the Jets are favored by 6 points in a home game against the Dolphins, we can take this to mean that Vegas thinks New York is about three points better than Miami. When we see that the Jets and Dolphins game is a pick’em for the matchup in Miami, this helps reinforce that view. And when Vegas says the Jets are a pick’em against the Browns at home, that tells us that Vegas thinks the Jets are about 3 points worse than the Browns *and* that the Dolphins are about 6 points worse than Cleveland. Using the iterative SRS process, and because the transitive property of point spreads applies, we can generate team ratings based on the 240 point spreads involved.

Here’s how to read the table below, in each case excluding week 17 action. After adjusting for home field advantage, the Patriots are expected to beat their average opponent by 6.6 points. On average, New England’s opponents (after adjusting for *their* strength of schedule) are 1.0 points below average, which means the Patriots are expected to be 5.5 points better than average (difference due to rounding). That’s the best in the league; the worst team in the league is the Cardinals. [continue reading…]

There have been two really remarkable upsets this season: one at the time, and one particularly in retrospect.

In week 3, the Bills went on the road and hammered the Minnesota Vikings, 27-6. Buffalo was a 16.5-point underdog; this season, no other team has won a game as an underdog of more than 10 points. It was an anomaly of historic proportions, marking the first time a team was ever a 15-point underdog and won by 15 or more points.

The other remarkable game was in week 1, when the Saints lost at home to Tampa Bay. The Bucs are 2-7 since that game, while New Orleans is 9-0. So while it was a huge upset at the time — it is tied with Titans/Jaguars as the second biggest upset of the season (10-point spread) — it’s even more remarkable in retrospect. [continue reading…]

In week 10, Alabama produced the win of the season, blanking #3 LSU, 29-0, in Baton Rouge. It was the worst home loss for Louisiana State since 2002, and yet another example of how Alabama is operating on a different level than any other team in college football.

Alabama scored a 91.8 in the SRS for this performance, and the Crimson Tide now have the best two games of the season (Alabama also had a 91.8 in a 62-0 win over Mississippi). The worst game of the year by Alabama (according to the SRS) was a 51-14 drubbing over Louisville on opening weekend. The second-worst game this season was a 65-31 win on the road against Arkansas. A 45-23 win over Texas A&M was the only game the Crimson Tide have won by less than four touchdowns.

Nick Saban has won 5 national championships with Alabama, and his 2016 team was a dominant squad that went 14-0 and lost in the final minute of the national championship game. And yet… this feels like the best Alabama team under Saban, and by a pretty clear margin. And if it’s the best Alabama team under Saban, it’s not too hard to suggest it’s the best Alabama team ever. And if it’s the best Alabama team ever, well, it’s obviously in the discussion for best college football team ever.

That’s how good this 2018 Alabama team is. Right now, they are a touchdown better than the rest of the FBS. Even Clemson has had a couple of unimpressive games: the Tigers needed to rally and score a last minute touchdown to beat an average Syracuse team, and caught a break in a 2-point win over Texas A&M. That’s perfectly normal for an average elite team, but those two blemishes are a standard deviation below anything an apparently invincible Alabama has done this year. Below are the full week 10 SRS ratings. [continue reading…]

It was not a particularly eventful week in terms of college football upsets. No top-5 SRS teams lost, and only two top-10 SRS teams lost — and both lost to very good teams. Iowa ranked 7th in the SRS last week, and lost on the road to Penn State, who ranked 11th in the week 8 ratings. The annual Florida/Georgia game in Jacksonville featured two top 10 teams, with then-#3 Georgia defeating then-#8 Florida.

Other top teams to lose: #13 Washington, #15 Texas A&M, #16 Purdue, #21 Texas Tech, #22 Missouri, #23 Wisconsin, and #26 Texas. The Longhorns may have been 26th in the SRS, but with a 6-1 record and wins over USC, TCU, and Oklahoma, the Longhorns entered week 8 6th in the AP rankings. A loss to Oklahoma State (hi Doug!) in Stillwater now puts the Big 12 playoff picture into chaos. Next week, West Virginia travels to Austin in a matchup of two of the top teams in the conference.

Alabama was off this week, which opened the way for Georgia and Clemson to be the dominant teams of the week. Both teams demolished teams from Florida: the Bulldogs defeated a pretty good Florida team by 19, while Clemson crushed a bad Seminoles team by 49 points. West Virginia, Arizona, and Utah round out the top 5 teams of the week in terms of single game SRS ratings. [continue reading…]

Four teams saw their SRS ratings drop by at least 4 points from their rating one week ago: Ohio State, Oregon State, Minnesota, and Tulane. In that group, Ohio State was the notable loss, of course: Purdue was 38th in the SRS — so better than people may have realized — but still had a rating 14 points lower than that of the Buckeye. Yet in week 8, Purdue blew out Ohio State 49-20, producing one of the three best performances of the season (joining ALabama’s 62-7 blowout against Ole Miss and LSU’s 36-16 win over Georgia).

Purdue was joined by Virginia, North Carolina, California, and Nebraska as teams that saw their SRS rise by at least 4 points. Below are the full SRS ratings through 8 weeks. As always thanks to Dr. Peter R. Wolfe for providing the weekly game logs. [continue reading…]

It was an eventful week of college football, with 6 teams ranking in the top 16 falling in week 7:

• #2 Georgia was blown out by LSU, 36-16.

• #6 West Virginia lost to giant killer Iowa State; over the last 53 weeks, the Cyclones have beaten three Big 12 teams that ranked in the top 6: Oklahoma and TCU in 2017, and the Mountaineers 30-14 on Saturday.

• #7 Washington, which had a loss to Auburn in the season opener (and which only looks uglier in retrospect, as the Tigers have gone 2-3 against the rest of the FBS since then), had a perhaps fatal loss to Oregon on Saturday afternoon. The Huskies lost in overtime, 30-27, in Eugene.

• #8 Penn State, a week after a narrow home loss to Ohio State, was upset 21-17 at home against Michigan State.

• #15 Wisconsin was obliterated by Michigan in Ann Arbor, 38-13. The 25-point differential was the worst by the Badgers in a true road game in over a decade.

• #16 Miami lost to Virginia, 16-13.

In addition, Notre Dame narrowly beat Pittsburgh (19-14), Central Florida barely escaped Memphis (31-30), and Texas, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M all escaped with one-score wins. [continue reading…]

It’s time, once again, to release the first edition of the college football Simple Rating System ratings. While it’s too early to put too much weight on these ratings, they help to at least begin framing the discussion of which are the most impressive teams in college football. As a reminder, here is the methodology:

1) For each game not played at a neutral site, 3 points are given to the road team. After that adjustment, all wins and losses of between 7 and 24 points are recorded exactly as such. This means that a 24-10 road win goes down as +17 for the road team, -17 for the home team.

2) With one exception, wins of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7-point wins and losses of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7 point losses. So a 4-point home win goes down as +7 (and not a 1) and a 1-point home loss is a -7 (and not a -4). The one exception is that road losses of 3 or fewer (and home wins of 3 or fewer) are graded as ties. So a 21-20 home victory goes down as a 0 for both teams.

3) Wins/Losses of more than 24 points are scored as the average between the actual number and 24. This is to avoid giving undue credit to teams that run up the score. So a 75-point home win goes down as a 48-point win.

Once we have a rating for each team in each game, we then adjust each result for strength of schedule. This is an iterative process, where we adjust the ratings hundreds of times (to adjust for SOS, you have to adjust for the SOS of each opponent, and the SOS of each opponent’s opponent, and so on.) in Excel. Then we produce final ratings, where the SRS rating is the sum of the Margin of Victory and Strength of Schedule in every week. [continue reading…]

Yesterday, I posted the implied SRS ratings from the Vegas lines released this weekend covering the first 240 games of the season. This is one of my favorite exercises of the year — the Vegas ratings are a great tool to use a starting point for all sorts of projections — so I’ve decided to turn this into a two-part post.

Vegas does not include week 17 point spreads, but we can generate them based on the ratings we have now generated. And we can also perform a much more substantive strength of schedule calculation than the one you typically see. This year, the Arizona Cardinals have the toughest schedule in the league. The table below shows each team’s SOS for all 16 games in 2018:

Arizona’s road schedule is particularly brutal: the Cardinals are 6.5 point underdogs (yes, in large part because the Cardinals are expected to be bad) in every game on the road this year. ^[1]Aand while there’s no line out for the week 17 game in Seattle, the implied ratings tell us that the spread would probably be Seattle -6.5 or Seattle -7. In addition to tough road games against the Seahawks, Rams, and 49ers, Arizona has to visit the Chargers, Chiefs, Falcons, Packers, and Vikings!

Meanwhile, the Texans and Patriots have the two easiest schedules in the NFL. Both teams get the Jets, Dolphins, Bills, and Colts — six for New England, four for Houston of course — while the Texans also get home games against the Browns and Giants. In addition, the Patriots have just five games against top-14 teams, while the Texans have just four games against top-12 teams.

Oh, and don’t pay any attention to articles that claim that the Packers have the hardest schedule in the NFL in 2018. Yes, Green Bay’s opponents this year won 138 games in 2017, the most of any slate of opponents. But that includes games a bunch of games against teams who are expected to be worse than their 2017 record, like the 8-8 Cardinals, the 9-7 Bills, the 7-9 Redskins, and two games each against the 9-7 Lions (21st in the SRS) and 13-3 Vikings (3rd in the SRS). Green Bay’s schedule is actually easier than average — the Packers are road dogs to the Patriots, Rams, and Vikings, but are otherwise favored in every other game (it helps, of course, that the Packers are expected to be very good). Only six of the team’s 16 games are against teams with a positive SRS. [continue reading…]

Ever year, CG Technology releases point spreads for all NFL games during the first 16 weeks of the the season. And as I do every year, I then use those weekly ratings to figure out what the Vegas ratings are for each team.

What we do is take the point spread in each game, adjust for home field (except for the four international games), and then determine how by many points Vegas thinks Team A is better than Team B. When the Patriots are favored by 8.5 points in a road game against the Jets, we can take this to mean that Vegas thinks New England is 11.5 points better than New York. When Vegas says New England is a 7-point home favorite against the Texans, that tells us that Vegas thinks the Patriots are 4 points better than Houston. That’s just two games, of course: Using the iterative SRS process, we can generate season ratings based on the 240 point spreads involved. Here are those ratings, again as of May 13, 2017.

Here’s how to read the table below. After adjusting for home field advantage, the Patriots are expected to beat their average opponent by 6.17 points (this is their Expected HFA-Adj MOV). On average, New England’s opponents (after adjusting for *their* strength of schedule) are -0.47 points better than average, which means the Patriots are expected to be 5.69 points better than average (difference due to rounding). That’s the best in the league; the worst team in the league, perhaps surprisingly, is still the Browns. [continue reading…]

For the last few years, I have introduced the first edition of the College Football SRS Ratings after five weeks. I’m a week late this year, so it’s time to release the first college football ratings. And while it’s too early to put too much weight on these ratings, they help to at least begin framing the discussion of which are the most impressive teams in college football. As a reminder, here is the methodology:

1) For each game not played at a neutral site, 3 points are given to the road team. After that adjustment, all wins and losses of between 7 and 24 points are recorded exactly as such. This means that a 24-10 road win goes down as +17 for the road team, -17 for the home team.

2) With one exception, wins of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7-point wins and losses of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7 point losses. So a 4-point home win goes down as +7 (and not a 1) and a 1-point home loss is a -7 (and not a -4). The one exception is that road losses of 3 or fewer (and home wins of 3 or fewer) are graded as ties. So a 21-20 home victory goes down as a 0 for both teams.

3) Wins/Losses of more than 24 points are scored as the average between the actual number and 24. This is to avoid giving undue credit to teams that run up the score. So a 75-point home win goes down as a 48-point win.

Once we have a rating for each team in each game, we then adjust each result for strength of schedule. This is an iterative process, where we adjust the ratings hundreds of times (to adjust for SOS, you have to adjust for the SOS of each opponent, and the SOS of each opponent’s opponent, and so on.) in Excel. Then we produce final ratings, where the SRS rating is the sum of the Margin of Victory and Strength of Schedule in every week. [continue reading…]

Today at 538:

So far this season, 45 players have been flagged for at least five offensive penalties, and six of those players are Raiders: backup lineman Vadal Alexander (8), followed by Penn (7), center Rodney Hudson (6), guard Gabe Jackson (6), WR Michael Crabtree (5) and guard Kelechi Osemele (5). In total, Raiders offensive linemen have been flagged for 33 penalties, nine more than any other offensive line in the league.

That’s a lot of penalties, but what that analysis is missing is what’s happening on all the plays that don’t result in a penalty — especially if those plays include ones where the refs don’t throw a flag because they’ve already thrown so many. And Oakland’s offensive line is doing really, really well on those plays. No team has spent more 2016 salary cap dollars on its offensive line than the Raiders, and it’s paid off: Oakland has been sacked on just 2.7 percent of all pass plays this season, the lowest rate in the NFL. And Oakland’s top three running backs — Latavius Murray, DeAndre Washington, Jalen Richard — aren’t highly-regarded and weren’t drafted with premium picks, but they have rushed 156 times for 763 yards and 6 touchdowns, averaging 4.9 yards per attempt. The Oakland line is getting things done.

You can read the full article here.

The most dominant win of week 9 came from…. Tulsa? Entering the week, Memphis was 5-2, with only road losses against ranked teams in Memphis and Navy. Memphis ranked 38th in the SRS last week, and was a 6-point favorite at home against Tulsa. But the Golden Hurricane broke open the game in the second half, scoring the final 24 points en route to a 59-30 victory. Running back James Flanders had 33 carries for 249 yards and 5 touchdowns, including scores of 52 and 48 yards.

In slightly more relevant week 9 news, there was some B12 on B12 crime this weekend, as the last two remaining teams in the conference went down.  Oklahoma State had the 2nd best SRS performance of the week, winning by 17 against previously unbeaten West Virginia. Texas was a bit less impressive, but still had the third best B12 performance of the week in a 35-34 home victory against Baylor.

But perhaps the most notable performance of the week came from Auburn, as the Tigers went on the road and scored 13 fourth quarter points to beat Ole Miss in Oxford, 40-29.  Auburn now seems like a legitimate candidate to beat Alabama, or at least give the Tide a competitive game in the Iron Bowl.

Below are the single-game SRS results from this weekend. As always, thanks to Peter R. Wolfe for providing the game scores. [continue reading…]

The Jets have had a brutal strength of schedule so far. Based on Pro-Football-Reference.com’s SRS ratings, and adjusted for home field, the Jets have had the toughest schedule this year, with home game against the Bengals, and Seahawks, and road games against the Bills, Chiefs, Steelers, and Cardinals.

The good news? For the rest of the season, the Jets have the 21st toughest schedule in the league, and no team has an easier dropoff in schedule than New York. This was predictable — in fact, I wrote just that for 538 in the offseason.

On the flip side, we have the Seahawks. Here’s how to read the table below, using Seattle. They are ranked 32nd, because no team’s schedule gets more difficult. Seattle’s through week 6 SOS — the TW6 SOS column — is -3.06, meaning its average opponent was about three points worse than average. That’s been the 31st toughest (or 2nd easiest) slate in the league. Meanwhile, Seattle’s rest of year SOS — marked as ROY SOS — is +2.13, the 3rd toughest left in football. That’s a difference of -5.19 (i.e., negative is bad, because the schedule is now harder). [continue reading…]

Last week, Michigan jumped to number one in the SRS after demolishing Rutgers. The Wolverines, on bye, stayed at number one this week, but the Crimson Tide are coming after them. The top team of week 7 was Alabama, who destroyed a good conference opponent in Tennessee.  Here’s what you need to know: the Crimson Tide….

• outgained the Vols, 613-201;
• outrushed the Vols, 438-32, the most rushing yards by Alabama in 30 years; and
• scored on both a punt return and an interception return, winning 49-7.

Given that the Volunteers have an SRS rating of 50.4, and that the game was in Tennessee, a 39-point road victory translates to an SRS rating of 83.4; no other team in week 7 cracked 70.

The second best win came from West Virginia; at 5-0 and now #16 in the SRS, it may be time to start watching the Mountaineers more closely.  WVU’s toughest opponents to date have been BYU and Kansas State, and both were close wins.  But the Big 12’s best hope for national relevance is for both West Virginia and Baylor to enter their December 3rd matchup undefeated. Unlikely, of course, but that’s at least a path.

Oh, and the Western Michigan hype machine should keep rolling.  The Broncos destroyed Akron, which may not sound that impressive, but for reference: WMU won 41-0 in Akron, while Wisconsin won 54-10 at home against the Zips. Running back Jarvion Franklin had 33 carries for 281 yards in the win. [continue reading…]

For the last couple of years, I have introduced the first edition of the College Football SRS Ratings after five weeks.  So with five weeks in the books, it’s time to release the first college football ratings. And while it’s too early to put too much weight on these ratings, they help to at least begin framing the discussion of which are the most impressive teams in college football.  As a reminder, here is the methodology:

1) For each game not played at a neutral site, 3 points are given to the road team. After that adjustment, all wins and losses of between 7 and 24 points are recorded exactly as such. This means that a 24-10 road win goes down as +17 for the road team, -17 for the home team.

2) With one exception, wins of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7-point wins and losses of 7 or fewer points are scored as 7 point losses. So a 4-point home win goes down as +7 (and not a 1) and a 1-point home loss is a -7 (and not a -4). The one exception is that road losses of 3 or fewer (and home wins of 3 or fewer) are graded as ties. So a 21-20 home victory goes down as a 0 for both teams.

3) Wins/Losses of more than 24 points are scored as the average between the actual number and 24. This is to avoid giving undue credit to teams that run up the score. So a 75-point home win goes down as a 48-point win.

Once we have a rating for each team in each game, we then adjust each result for strength of schedule. This is an iterative process, where we adjust the ratings hundreds of times (to adjust for SOS, you have to adjust for the SOS of each opponent, and the SOS of each opponent’s opponent, and so on.) in Excel. Then we produce final ratings, where the SRS rating is the sum of the Margin of Victory and Strength of Schedule in every week. [continue reading…]

On Friday, I looked at the SRS ratings of AFC teams. Today, let’s do the same for the NFC. And let’s start with the NFC East, which has been a consistently inconsistent division that, over time, looks average. The four NFC East teams have each won the division twice over the last 8 years, but the division as a whole has clearly declined over that period:

The peak NFC East came in 2007: the Cowboys were the #1 seed, the Giants won the Super Bowl, and both Philadelphia and Washington had positive SRS grades. Last year? None of the four teams had a positive SRS grade. [continue reading…]

I thought it would be fun to look at the SRS ratings for each division in the AFC since realignment in 2002. SRS, of course, stands for Simple Rating System: at its core, it’s just points differential (per game) adjusted for strength of schedule. To derive division ratings, I simply took the average of the SRS ratings of each of the four teams in any given season.

Let’s start with the best division in the conference over the last 14 years, the AFC East. From 2002 to 2015, the average AFC East team season has produced an SRS of +2.0. That’s the best division in football, and by a pretty large margin, too (second is the AFC North at +0.9). That said, the AFC East is on a bit of a decline lately: the division was below-average in 2012 and 2013, and barely above-average last year. But in ’04, ’06, ’09, and ’10, the AFC East produced some outstanding seasons. Take a look:

The division hasn’t exactly had a lot of turnover at the top: the Patriots won the division every year but ’02 (Jets) and ’08 (Dolphins), and New England obviously is the driving force here. The Patriots are at +9.5, while the other three teams average a -0.6 rating. But the AFC East also doesn’t have a bottom-feeder, and that helps. The AFC doesn’t have a Raiders, Jaguars, or Browns dragging it down; the Bills SRS rating since ’02 is -1.4, which is easily the best of any 4th-place team in any division in the NFL. Having the best team in the NFL and the best worst team makes it pretty easy to see why the AFC East fares so well here. [continue reading…]

Meet the new boss, Nick Saban as always.

The Golden Nugget released the point spreads for 100 games this season, and Johnny Detroit was kind enough to pass along that data for purposes of this post.  With only data for 100 games, how am I able to conclude that Vegas views Alabama as the best team (or, at least, one of the top 2 teams)  in college football? Consider:

• Alabama is a 6-point road favorite at Ole Miss this year. That is the only game this year (of the seven we have lines for) where Mississippi is an underdog, and the Rebels are an 8-point home favorite against Auburn and a 4.5-point home favorite against Georgia.  The Rebels finished 10th in the polls last year and are projected to be the 10th-best team this year, so this line says all you need to know about Alabama.

• Against Auburn, Alabama is a 15-point home favorite (that’s a touchdown better than Ole Miss is against Auburn).   The Tigers were not great last year, but are still projected at #20 this year.

• In Arkansas, the Crimson Tide are 8.5-point favorites.  In the other 3 home games for Arkansas, the Razorbacks are 7.5-point dogs to LSU (the #3 team by this methodology), 1-point underdogs to Mississippi, and a 2.5-point favorite against Florida.

• Alabama is a 15-point favorite at home against Mississippi State and a 14-point home favorite against Texas A&M.  Both of those teams are projected to be, by Vegas, top 30 teams this year.

• In Tennessee, Alabama is a 1-point dog, but the Vols are projected as the 6th best team this year! Tennessee is a pick’em in Georgia, a 5-point favorite in College Station, an 11-point favorite at home against Florida, and a 13-point favorite in a neutral site game against Virginia Tech.

• LSU is projected to be the 3rd best team in college football. The Tigers are an 11-point favorite at home against MSU, a 9.5-point home favorite against Ole Miss, 7.5-point road favorites in Florida and Arkansas, a touchdown favorite in Auburn, a 6-point favorite in College Station, and – only – a 2.5-point home favorite against Alabama.

You may be wondering, how do we know how good Alabama’s opponents are? Well, we can imply the ratings of each team in college football based on these points spreads.  I explained how to do this last year, but here is the refresher:

The system is pretty simple: I took the point spread for each game and turned it into a margin of victory, after assigning 3 points to the road team in each game. Do this for every game, iterate the results hundreds of times ala the Simple Rating System, and you end up with a set of power ratings.

Two quick notes about the rankings.

1) These are not intended to be surprise. The methodology may be somewhat complicated, but all these ratings are intended to do is quantify public perception.

2) These are not “my” ratings. These are simply the implied ratings based on the Vegas (or, more specifically, the Golden Nugget) points spreads; nothing more, nothing less.

Below are the ratings for 51 college football teams. In the table below, I’ve included the number of games for which we have point spreads for each team on the far left. The “MOV” column shows the home field-adjusted average margin of victory for that team, the “SOS” column shows the average rating of each team’s opponents (for only the number of games for which we have lines), and the “SRS” column shows the school’s implied SRS rating. As you can see, Alabama is projected to be the strongest team in college football, but Oklahoma is just a hair behind: [continue reading…]

With the college football regular season now officially over, let’s look at the final SRS ratings from 2015:

[continue reading…]

In week 1, the Titans blew out the Bucs, in Tampa Bay, by the score of 42-14. Right now, the Bucs have an SRS rating of -5.9, but the Titans are even worse, at -7.7. Given the location of the game, we would “expect” Tampa Bay to have defeated Tennessee by about five points. So with the Titans winning by 28 points, that means Tennessee exceeded expectations by about 33 points. That’s the largest outlier of any game this year. Note that the Titans exceeded expectations by 36.5 points in week 1 of 2014, making it the second least-conforming game of last season.

Let’s start with the SRS ratings, presented below. These are through week 12, but also include the Packers/Lions game from Thursday night. [continue reading…]

After twelve weeks, there were still about a dozen teams jockeying for the final four spots. And with Notre Dame’s loss in Palo Alto, we no longer have to ask that pesky Oklahoma/Notre Dame question.

This year seems likely to be the perfect one for a four-team playoff, as the gap between the 4th and 5th most deserving teams — assuming results go as planned next weekend — matches the natural divide from the on-field results.

• The SEC has one dominant team this year, Alabama. Assuming the Crimson Tide defeat Florida in the SEC Championship Game, Alabama will make the playoff. But the SEC did get a little lucky: if not for Arkansas gaining a first down on an absurd lateral, Ole Miss would have won the SEC West this year. What would the committee do with an 11-2 Mississippi team that beat Bama but lost 38-10 to Florida and by 13 points to Memphis, but won the SEC and beat the Gators in the rematch? Tough to say, but I think we’re all better off that we don’t have to ask that question this year. Assuming Alabama wins, the Tide will finish at 12-1 and very deserving of a playoff spot, while every other SEC team will have at least three losses.

• The Big 10 had four good teams this year, but it happened to have one of them in the Big 10 West, which may as well have been in Mountain West. With 14 teams and just 8 conference games (the same as the SEC), each team plays one game against the other six teams in its division, and only two games against the teams from the other division. This is how a team like Kentucky can finish with a weak schedule despite “playing in the SEC” — the Wildcats faced Auburn and Mississippi State from the West, the weak SEC East, and a soft nonconference schedule. Iowa had a similar setup, getting Maryland and Indiana from the Big 10 East, the underwhelming Big 10 West, and a pretty easy nonconference schedule (other than Pitt). The difference: Kentucky went 5-7, while Iowa rode this schedule to 12-0. Over in the Big 10 East, Michigan, Ohio State, and Michigan State were the class of the division. They went undefeated against the rest of the East, but Michigan State swept Michigan and Ohio State, albeit in skin-of-teeth fashion: the Spartans never led in either game until the clock hit triple zeroes. Regardless, we now have a great B10 Championship Game, and the winner of Iowa/Michigan State will obviously be a very deserving playoff team. Iowa would be 13-0, and Michigan State would be 12-1 with wins over Ohio State, Michigan, Iowa, and Oregon, with the one loss coming in controversial fashion on a bad call against Nebraska.

• The Big 12, like the Big 10, had four good teams this year. Unlike the Big 10, all four teams played each other in the conference’s round robin schedule. Oklahoma went 3-0 against Oklahoma State, Baylor, and TCU, which was enough to make up for the Sooners slip against Texas earlier in the year. The Cowboys, Bears, and Horned Frogs all finished 10-2 (assuming TCU beats Texas next weekend), making an 11-1 OU team the clear deserving choice. It doesn’t hurt that Oklahoma also had the most impressive nonconference win of the group, a 31-24 double overtime victory in Tennessee.

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The chaos continues in college football. In week 12, two more undefeated teams lost, with Ohio State losing at the last second to Michigan State, and Oklahoma State losing, 45-35, against Baylor. That leaves just two undefeated teams remaining in the Football Bowl Subdivision: Clemson and Iowa. The Tigers are now #3 in the SRS, mostly because both Oklahoma and Alabama have slightly higher margins of victory and strengths of schedule than Clemson.

Iowa is down at #15 in the SRS, mostly because of strength of schedule. the Hawkeyes played a terrible North Texas team and an FCS Illinois State out of conference, while Indiana, Minnesota, and Maryland aren’t doing much for Iowa’s schedule. On the top end, only three opponents — Wisconsin (#26), Pittsburgh (#28), and Northwestern (#47)– rank in the top sixty. Against that backdrop, Iowa’s margin of victory simply isn’t good enough to vault them into the top ten of the simple rating system. (For comparison’s sake, Baylor, North Carolina, and Navy have all faced weaker schedules, but have strong enough MOVs to rank ahead of Iowa.)

But this is mostly an academic discussion. For purposes of the 2015 season, Iowa remains in great position to make the playoff. The Hawkeyes have a sneaky tough matchup in the season finale, as Iowa travels to Lincoln, Nebraska to face a 5-6 Cornhuskers team that will be fighting for its own postseason berth. Yeah, Nebraska has six losses, but those games have come by a combined 23 points, and Nebraska has lost several of those games in the final seconds.

Three teams remain in complete control of their playoff destiny: Clemson, Alabama, and Iowa. If all the favorites win, that will leave the committee with a very interesting decision for the final spot, having to choose between Oklahoma and Notre Dame. And if Iowa loses, but Michigan State finishes 12-1, the Spartans may simply take Iowa’s spot, so that won’t help solve any Sooner/Irish debate. It’s still too early to panic for any of the contenders — I think we are only in the middle of the chaos — but the end of the regular season is shaping up to be very, very interesting.

Last week, I noted that the Big 12 would be fine, unless the winner of Bedlam lost on Saturday. And while Oklahoma did beat TCU, Oklahoma State suffered its first loss of the season, setting up a nightmare scenario for the Big 12. If the Cowboys beat the Sooners, the Big 12 may have Baylor as its only hope of making the playoffs.

And, for what it’s worth, Baylor is now up to #4 in the SRS. Below are the ratings through week 12:
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Last week, I looked at how the Big 12 schedule was backloaded. There are four top teams in the conference, and the six-game round robin among those teams was placed at the back third of each team’s schedule. So far, just two of those six games have been played: Oklahoma State beat TCU last weekend, and Oklahoma beat Baylor last night. That means the winner in Bedlam in two weeks — which takes place in Stillwater — has a leg up on the rest of the conference. The winner in Bedlam will be the Big 12 champion assuming they win next weekend. Of course, that’s no sure thing, given that next week Oklahoma hosts TCU and Oklahoma State hosts Baylor. And yes, for those keeping score at home, that does mean the Cowboys got home draws against TCU, Baylor, and OU this year.

If the Bedlam winner wins next week, too, they are almost certainly going to make the college football playoff. The only way they don’t is if literally everything here happens:

• Ohio Sate beats Michigan State, Michigan, and wins in the B10 Championship Game

• Notre Dame wins in Boston against Boston College and in Palo Alto against Stanford

• Clemson beats Wake Forest and South Carolina and then wins in the ACC Championship Game

• The winner of the SEC Championship Game wins their in-state rivalry game (UF-FSU and Bama-Auburn)

• The committee decides that Notre Dame is more deserving than the B12 champ.

The odds of that happening would be, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, under five percent. So while the Big 12 won’t occupy a top four spot in this week’s playoff standings, and may even fail to place a team in the top five, there’s little reason to think the B12 won’t send a team to the playoffs for the second year in a row. That is, unless the Bedlam winner loses at home next week.

Below are the SRS ratings through eleven weeks. As always thanks to Dr. Peter R. Wolfe for providing the weekly game logs. [continue reading…]

Last week’s ratings can be seen here.

The schedules of Baylor, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and TCU are very backloaded. Other than Oklahoma’s game against Tennessee, none of the four teams had much of a threat in the nonconference schedule, and the B12 schedule just so happened to be incredibly backloaded. These four teams are the class of the Big 12, but many of their games were scheduled for later in the year. Below are the SOS ratings of each opponent in each game for these four teams, with weaker games in red and tougher games in blue:

Let’s use that same formatting but insert the opponent’s names. For Oklahoma, the three games against the other three teams are the last three games on the Sooners schedule. For the other three schools, the three round robin games are three of their final four games. There is a bit of randomness involved — if Texas or Kansas State or West Virginia was good this year, we wouldn’t have this situation — but it does make for an excellent final month of the season.

Below are the SRS ratings through ten weeks. As always thanks to Dr. Peter R. Wolfe for providing the weekly game logs. [continue reading…]

As they did last week, the Clemson Tigers top the SRS ratings through nine weeks. Little changed in the top five, this week, or well, anywhere in the top 25. In fact, none of the teams in the top 20 of the SRS last week lost in week nine. The highest ranked teams to lose were West Virginia (#21) and Cal (#22), but both of those teams lost to higher-ranked teams (TCU and USC, respectively).

As a result, the standings will look pretty similar to what we saw last week. Below are the SRS ratings through nine weeks. As always thanks to Dr. Peter R. Wolfe for providing the weekly game logs. [continue reading…]

Here are the SRS ratings as of this morning — that is, through seven weeks and the Patriots/Dolphins game last night. The formula here was pretty simple: I took the difference between each team’s points scored and points allowed in each game, and added 3 points for home field, and that was it. The Patriots have a HFA-adjusted average margin of victory this season of 16.1, against a schedule that (after iterating) has been 0.5 points below average. That gives New England an SRS of 15.7.

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It’s time to start taking Clemson seriously. The Tigers began the season 6-0, but none of the wins were particularly dominant. Clemson beat up on a pair of non-Power 5 schools (Appalachian State and FCS Wofford), had solid but unspectacular home wins over mediocre ACC teams (Georgia Tech and Boston College), and squeaked by a decent Louisville team and a very good Notre Dame team.

But yesterday, Clemson laid waste to Miami, with a 58-0 final score going down as the most lopsided loss in Hurricanes history. At this point, the smart money is on Clemson to finish the regular season undefeated, landing the Tigers one of college football’s four golden tickets.

Clemson still has to face Florida State, and while the Tigers have lost three straight to the Seminoles, that game is in Clemson, and right now, Clemson is 10 points better in the SRS. The other remaining games: N.C. State (36th in the SRS), Syracuse (72nd) and Wake Forest (84th) in the ACC, before a season-ending rivalry game against South Carolina (77th).

The other interesting riser this week: Oklahoma. Given how good Baylor and TCU were last year, and the fact that the Sooners lost to Texas, it’s easy to think of the Big 12 as a two-team race. Not so fast! Oklahoma looks to be outstanding this year, and that 7-point win in Tennessee — the Vols’ worst loss this year — is looking better each week. The Sooners just destroyed a Texas Tech team that nearly (and probably should have) beaten TCU, so circle November 14th, November 21st, and November 27th on your calendars: those are the dates Oklahoma travels to Baylor, TCU travels to Norman, and the Bears head to Fort Worth, respectively. Given that each team hosts one game in this round robin, the ultimate Big 12 disaster scenario is a 1-1 record for each team during these games (well, other than Oklahoma State upsetting one of these teams, too). [continue reading…]

Last week, I introduced the first edition of the SRS for the 2015 college football season. This week, we have a new number one: the Michigan Wolverines.

Michigan scored 38 points in a win over Northwestern yesterday; that matches the number of points allowed by the team all season. Michigan has now posted three consecutive shutouts, and all six games have come against FBS competition, allowing just 6.3 points per game in the process. Boston College is second in points allowed versus FBS competition, at 10 per game, but the Eagles are averaging only six points per game in those contests.

Michigan’s averaging a respectable 29.5 points per game this year; as a result, the Wolverines have an average points differential of 23.2 per game. The only teams better than that? Baylor (with a ridiculous 43.75 points per game differential) and Boise State (24), but Michigan’s tougher SOS gives the Wolverines the jump in the SRS.

Without further ado, below are the SRS ratings through six weeks. As always thanks to Dr. Peter R. Wolfe for providing the weekly game logs. [continue reading…]