I know I told someone about Purdue's defense. Can't remember if that was you guys or my son, but I told you! Look, there is only one B1G team built to dig itself out of a hole and that's OSU. Fight me.
Another rough weekend for some highly ranked teams, and that's what makes this sport great no matter how hard ESPN and Fox try to ruin it by pushing their narratives.
I'm thinking I need to go back to the reverse reveal so that I don't forget anyone, so here we go:
25. Oregon (prev 24) 5-1 Squeaked by a pretty bad Cal team 24-17. You may ask why Oregon is so low when they beat OSU in week 2. It's not week 2. Honestly, the OSU win is the only thing keeping them in the top 25. OSU is 5-1; the rest of the Ducks' opponents are 9-17 combined. Their opponents' opponents are 108-80, and 87-62 without OSU. Not awful but not great.
24. Arkansas (prev 15) 4-3 Lost to Auburn 38-23 in the 4th quarter. It was a pretty even game if you look at the stats, and really could have gone either way. The Piggies have lost 3 straight and have crashed back to earth. Still, they look better than they have in a long time.
23. Mississippi State (prev 17) 3-3 Lost to Alabama 49-9. The interesting part to me was the 1st quarter really. MissSt seemed to be able to move the ball well and just flopped at the important bits. They did sack Young a couple of times, but he just never seems flustered. Mature beyond his years.
22. Baylor (prev unranked) 6-1 Beat BYU 38-24. Baylor pretty much dominated this game in all aspects. The Bears have only lost to OkSt and would be ranked higher if they hadn't scheduled FCS Texas Southern in week 2.
21. Boise State (prev 16) 3-4 Lost to Air Force 24-17. My poor Broncos have no consistency. So why are they ranked over 6-1 Baylor? Quality of opponents and opponents' opponents. Boise's 3 wins earn them almost as many 1st level points as Baylor's 5 wins (no points for FCS, remember), and they have better 2nd and 3rd level points. SRS is pretty close, too.
20. Utah (prev 18) 4-2 Beat ASU 35-21. They really put the clamps on the Sun Devil offense in the 2nd half. So how do you win and drop 2 places? Easy: the teams you've beaten aren't very good and this weekend didn't help them.
19. Michigan State (prev unranked) 7-0 Beat a pesky Indiana in a sloppy 20-15 game. MSU's OW% is .385. That is the lowest by far of any team in my top 25. It's so bad that it ranks 119th of 130 in FBS. Their SoS is 155th. They're lucky to be here.
18. Kentucky (prev 13) 6-1 Lost to Georgia 30-13. So far the Wildcats are the only school to score 2 touchdowns against the Bulldog D. Of course the second one was in garbage time.
17. Pitt (prev 23) 5-1 Beat that weird Va Tech team 28-7. The Panthers outgained the Hokies 411-224, helped by VTs Burmeister only completing 34.4% of his passes. Not sure if that's a result of him being bad or Pitt's D playing well?
16. Purdue (prev unranked) 4-2 Beat Iowa 24-7. I really want to find where I mentioned the Boilermaker D. Anyway, Purdue didn't do anything special, they just wanted it more.
15. Air Force (prev 20) 6-1 Beat Boise State 24-17. So, I've been an AF fan since high school. I was in AFJROTC and we had a jog-a-thon (remember those?) on the day the great Fisher DeBerry lead his team to a victory over Notre Dame. We listened on the radio and loved every minute. It was heartbreaking when they lost to BYU in Provo while ranked 4th.
14. BYU (prev 11) 5-2 Lost to Baylor 38-24. Say what you will about BYU, they generally do not schedule soft. This time it bit them against the surging Bears.
13. Auburn (prev unranked) 5-2 Beat Arkansas 38-23. These are the kinds of moves that can make even me scratch my head. the Arkansas points help, and LSU beating Florida helped more (Auburn beat LSU 2 weeks ago).
12. Ole Miss (prev 14) 5-1 Beat Tennessee 31-26 in a pretty controversial ending, even before all the stuff got thrown onto the field. I haven't seen a good angle that shows he didn't get the 1st down. If you have a link, share! Kiffin and the Rebs have a shot at winning out depending on which A&M team shows up on Nov 13.
11. Wake Forest (prev 7) 6-0 DNP
10. Ohio State (prev 10) 5-1 DNP
9. Oklahoma (prev 6) 7-0 Beat TCU 52-31. OU has shown itself to be better under Caleb Williams than Spencer Rattler. So far, that is. That said, look at this:
8. Iowa (prev 3) 6-1 Lost to Purdue 24-7. You're going to need more than 273 yards of total offense and less than 4 turnovers if you're going to compete for a top spot. As OSU has found out a few times: you must win the games you're supposed to win.
7. Alabama (prev 9 ) 6-1 Beat Miss State 49-9. You knew Saban would have the Tide fired up and here we are. To be honest, I think they should have pulled Young by the 3rd, but that's just me.
6. Penn State (prev 12) 5-1 DNP, but we need to talk about this. As weird as it seems, this is exactly how the system should work. The teams they beat won this weekend, so that makes those victories worth more 1st level points. PSU's OW% is .606, their OOW% is .656, and their SoS is 21st.
5. Cincinnati (prev 8) 6-0 Beat UCF 56-21. Honestly, there's not much more the Bearcats can do except beat the teams they're supposed to beat by the margin required. Will it be enough? You know how the AP is: can't even begin to consider SoS or anything that resembles a metric.
4. Notre Dame (prev 4) 5-1 DNP
3. Michigan (prev 2) 6-0 DNP
2. Oklahoma State (prev 5) Beat Texas 32-26. Stop me if you've heard this one: Texas leads a top team going into the 4th quarter and then just implodes! You have heard it? Really? OK. Did you know that Texas has been outscored 41-7 in the 4th quarter in their past 2 games? You did? Hmm. The Cowboys are heading for a major showdown Nov 27 if they and OU can keep focused.
1. Georgia (prev 1) 7-0 Beat Kentucky 30-13. That D is special. They held a UK offense that had been averaging about 400 yds/gm to 243 yds. They only allowed 51 rushing yards. In giving up 2 TDs, they doubled the total number of TDs they'd given up for the season. And yes, I know the media is slobbering all over Bennett. All I can say to that is: how many more points do they score with JT?
Ray vs the AP
Here we go again. How does Bama lose to an unranked A&M and drop 4 while Iowa loses to unranked Purdue and drops 9? This right here is why human voters need to just plain go away. Ugh. 47 teams have now been ranked in the AP top 25 so far. Forty. Seven. If voters actually knew better than computer rankings, we should expect to see fewer teams making the AP poll, right? Yeah, right.
As usual, the Diff column is the ranking variance between my ranks and theirs. A positive number means the AP is ranked higher and a negative number means they are ranked lower than my system.
This always makes me laugh (and cry a little, not gonna lie). It feels like any team ranked below the top 10 gets votes based on some agenda that is different for every voter. it's like they're thinking, "I got the top 5 or 6 in line with what the fans want, now I can have some fun!"
As we can see, the mean difference is 5.6 spots. Considering the size of some of the variances, that is a surprisingly low number. Of course, the standard deviation explains that quite well. Think about that number: z=±1 encompasses 27.74 positions under the bell curve. That's a pretty big range!
Strangely enough, the SEC and B1G variances are pretty small overall. It's the Pac 12 that is way over ranked right now, and that is strictly because only Oregon is ranked.
Ray vs Massey's Composite
Unfortunately, Massey's Composite has only loaded 23 rankings so far, so my influence will be too large, but I don't want to wait until tomorrow.
Now, to my eye this looks better than the AP stuff. It's not.
The mean difference and SD are both bigger! I confess that I did not see that coming. This is yet another example of how trusting our eyes or trusting our "gut" will let us down in situations requiring analysis. As CFB requires analysis.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the weekend! We'll talk again soon.
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