Every Saturday night, Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman react to the weekend’s game schedule. The Andy Staples Show & Friends. On Monday Andy revisits his and Ali’s biggest takeaways from Saturday night’s immediate reaction. please.
The only ranking that actually matters debuts on Tuesday. And even these don’t really matter. Remember when the college football playoff selection committee released his rankings for the first time in 2014?
- Mississippi
- Florida
- auburn
- ole miss
How many of these teams actually achieved their first CFP? The Seminoles entered as the No. 3 seed on his 13-0 record, losing to Oregon in the Rose Bowl. So don’t despair if your team isn’t in the top four on Tuesday when the Commission releases its first rankings for his 2022 season.
As long as your team is one of the lucky 13, of course.
About the post-game version of The Andy Staples Show, Ali and I determined which teams remained CFP qualified. We may be wrong, but eight seasons worth of selection establishes a pretty reliable pattern. The Commission has yet to put a team with two losses* into the top four. You don’t have to be the conference champion to be in the top 4, but you’d better avoid big losses. (Unless you avenge her loss in a conference title game or beat the team that blew you away earlier in the season.) At the end of the show, Ali gave us all a homework assignment: These Rank 13 teams.
* Lucky 13 omits 2 losses LSU. This is due to Commission precedent. Things could change this year, even if LSU beats Alabama and then he beats Georgia or Tennessee for the SEC title. The two-loss Auburn probably made him the bracket in 2017, but the Tigers lost a rematch to Georgia in his SEC title game.
Going into this week’s game, these are the 13 teams still able to make the CFP, listed by conference.
ACC
big 12
big ten
- Illinois
- Michigan
- Ohio
Pac-12
SEC
- Alabama
- Georgia
- ole miss
- Tennessee
With so many teams remaining, it means we’ve had a pretty fun season so far. Also, I don’t think he has a team or two that definitely do. smash Everyone else is still hunting. A few years later when he expands the CFP to 12, he will be able to measure the number of teams still under investigation at this point by 12 units. But for now, I’m happy that this number is high.
I imagined a way to vote as a committee member to carry out Ali’s mission. We’ve gathered some statistics that we know are important to the committee. I also used a few that I think are important. We used his SP+ prediction rankings made by ESPN’s Bill Connelly. This is my favorite ranking formula, but if you want to use ESPN’s Football Power Index or Jeff Sagarin’s rankings, I can’t complain. (Bill’s formula can’t seem to accept that Texas won’t be back this year, but I’ll allow that.)
However, I like the strength of FPI’s schedule measurement. So I used it too. FPI also has a useful measure of remaining schedule strength, but it can only refer to games that have already been played, so it’s not needed for this exercise. We also used the strength of the FPI recording. This measures how hard a team’s record is to achieve based on opponent strength, travel time, rest time, and other factors.
One of my favorite stats is net points per drive. This is the number of points the team’s offense averages per drive minus the average number of points the team’s defense allows per opponent’s drive. Brian Fremeau maintains this stat on his excellent site. He also keeps available yards. This is another one of his pleasures. If a team wins the ball on their own 20, the available yards will be 80 yards. Scoring a touchdown gives him 100% of the available yards. I didn’t want to get into the weeds, though. So i left it.
It seems pretty arbitrary, and instead of using a win against a top 25 team that should rank 25th out of 131 teams, they stole the concept from the NCAA Basketball Selection Committee. In basketball, the committee focuses on the first quadrant (matches against teams in the top 25% of NET rankings). Soccer doesn’t have that much data, so I decided to count wins in quadrants 1 and 2 as rankings in SP+. Quad 1 is the teams ranked 1st to 30th. Quad 2 is the teams ranked 31st to 60th.
Also, I wanted to use the raw numbers, unadjusted by my own formulas. So I experimented with yards earned per play and yards allowed per play. This is also useful for adjusting tempo over total attack and total defense and identifying outliers.
I know enough about these teams to be able to make an educated guess about their identities based on the numbers, but before I start sorting the stats, let’s take a look at the teams from the spreadsheet. First name removed. I was hoping I would forget which team corresponds to which letter. That way, I could rank them based solely on what the teams did this season rather than brand name, past successes or failures, or conference affiliation.
Does that make this ranking objective? of course not. Rankings, by their very nature, are subjective. At some point, you’ll have to look at two (or three or four) data sets that look very similar and decide which to put on top.
Here is my spreadsheet. Feel free to rank your teams…
The actual committee selects a bucket of about 6 teams to select the top 3 teams. Then scrub 3 at a time until the list reaches 25. The top six here were the teams. E, F, K, J, M, L.
So I moved them to another spreadsheet and tried to parse them. Team J leads everyone in Quad 1 with four wins, but one loss. Team M He has won Quad 1 three times and Quad 2 twice, making him the all-time strongest player. However, Team M is one of only two teams on this list where he is above 15th nationally in yards per play. Its defense is number 39 in yards per play allowed. But that offense ranks him third in yards gained and fifth in net points per drive. In other words, its defense may be giving up yards, but Team M is typically winning games by healthy margins.
Team K and Team F look better. Neither are losing, and both are in the single digits in yards per play. Team K They are second in net points per drive, with one Quad 1 win and three Quad 2 wins. Team F 2nd in record strength and 1st in net points per drive. What are these two drawbacks? Their schedule is not as difficult as that of Team J or Team M.
Still, the two are so consistent that I feel they should be in the top two.so i’ll make it Team F 1st place When Team K No.2Now that we’ve picked only the top three, we’ll have to decide between Team J and Team M to get the rest of the team back into the pool. His No. 1 strength in Team M’s record suggests I should pick it, but I doubt Team M handed Team J a defeat. I like to use head-to-head results as tiebreakers. (Otherwise, why bother playing?)
There I took a peek at my keys and confirmed my suspicions. Team M is 3rdTeam J is back in the pool.
My top 3 look like this:
- Ohio State (Team F)
- Georgia (Team K)
- Tennessee (Team M)
Let’s move on. You probably guessed Team J was in Alabama, but let’s ignore that knowledge and compare it to the next group.
Take the remaining 3 teams from the first group (J, E, L) Added 3 more teams (H,C,G).
The two who jump out of the page Team J When Team E.I know who J is, so I try very hard not to make any assumptions. E has a similar strength record, with two wins for him in Quad 1 and two for him in Quad 2, netting him more points per drive rank. The defense seems to be more stingy, but the offense is less explosive. The biggest difference is the strength of the schedule. The strength of Team J’s schedule is that he is 10th out of 131 players. Team E has him in 79th place, the lowest of the six groups.So let’s nod Team J. Team E..
We ranked:
4. Alabama (Team J)
5. Michigan (Team E)
Let’s choose No. 6 from the remaining four lists. (H,C,G,L)All of these teams have more flaws than others, and those flaws seem to show up in their defenses. team G Losing, but only one win for Quad 1 or Quad 2. That team returns to the pool. team Cwas third in record strength, meaning they accomplished something difficult against their schedule. team L He has the highest net points per drive rank, with 2 wins in Quad 1 and 1 win in Quad 2.
i think i’ll go with you team CIf you peek at the key, you’ll see that it’s ranked.
6. TCU (Team C)
Without going into tedious details, we ranked the following 13 in the same way.
7. Ole Miss (Team L)
8. Clemson (Team A)
9. Oregon (Team G)
10. UCLA (Team H)
11. Illinois (Team D)
12. USC (Team I)
13. North Carolina (Team B)
What’s the biggest surprise? Olemis he is number 7. With the team name next to the stats, Ole Miss probably would have been around 10th. After seeing the rebels against Auburn, LSU, and Ole Miss, I don’t believe in their defenses. Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and the SEC East hold up well enough that he can beat the champion. However, their defensive stats weren’t as bad as I thought they would be and Clemson weren’t as good as I thought they would be. .
That said, I think Clemson’s chances of winning the CFP undefeated are much better than the odds of Ole Miss winning the bracket with a 12-1 record. But after looking at these numbers, I think the Tigers are less likely to beat Notre Dame, Louisville, Miami, South Carolina and the Coastal Division champions (probably North Carolina) than they were before. Taken individually, Clemson should beat each of these teams. But it feels like the Tigers aren’t playing within the same margin of error they did when they were making the CFP year after year. Another game as sloppy as the Syracuse matchup could be lost.
But that’s why they play games. Clemson could prove me wrong and get caught on the field.
The bigger question: Will this be next week’s Lucky 13? The Tennessee and Georgia losers will likely remain on the list. But can anyone else?
(Photo: Ekin Howard/Getty Images)
