Well folks, after 15 weeks that felt like 30 weeks, we finally made it. Conference Championship week is here, and all five Power-5 conferences are hosting games. We’ll have those win probabilities up later this week, but for now, let’s see how the Elo rankings look after the regular season.
For more CFB Playoff analysis, subscribe to the Staturdays newsletter for weekly college football stats and insight straight to your inbox. I’ll be looking deeper into the Heisman trophy race this week.
After 14 weeks of college football, Elo has the same top 4 as the College Football Playoff Committee (in a slightly different order). After that, things look a bit different, notably with LSU at 5, who fell off significantly from last year’s National Championship team. With shortened seasons in some conferences, prior-year performance is still weighing pretty heavily on the placement of some teams with losing records.
In other news, Ohio State will play in the Big Ten championship after a change in the rule by the conference. With only five games played, a lot of what we’re inferring about their ability is based on their success last season. Northwestern will be their final chance to show off their explosive offense and try to shore up their defense, although a good defensive performance against Northwestern’s offense won’t be too convincing to most.
For more CFB Playoff analysis, subscribe to the Staturdays newsletter for weekly college football stats and insight straight to your inbox. I’ll be looking deeper into the playoff this week.
We’ve updated our Elo Ratings since the last time we wrote about them. Specifically, we’ve recalculated the expected wins and win probabilities of all the teams based on their updated schedules. This resulted in lower overall win totals given the shortened season, but some teams have a higher win probability for the season as a result of the easier conference-only schedule (looking at you Notre Dame).
We’ll update these every week or so as the games are played, and the expected wins will update accordingly based on the actual result of the games. So we’ll have a clearer picture as the season goes on of exactly where each team will end up. But for now, this will give us a good idea of what we should expect.
What’s interesting/sad is that there are several teams in the top 25 that are projected to lose nearly half their games. In a normal season, that would never happen, but it’s a real possibility this year with only six conferences playing in the Fall. That’s very good news for teams like Appalachian State, UCF, and Memphis. These non-power-5 schools would be a long shot to make any sort of playoff in a normal year, but the door is wide open if they were able to win out and one or two of the top four lose a game or two.
Of those three, Appalachian State has the best chance to win out according to our simulation. We’ll post the full results of the season sim in the coming days.
BYU is also in a good position after their win against Navy. The rankings and expected wins reflect the fact that BYU has already won a game, essentially giving them a 100% win probability for any games that have been won already, or a 0% for any games already lost. They’re now projected to win 84% of their scheduled games. However, they are only scheduled for 8 games so they won’t be factored in to any playoff discussion in all likelihood.
Staturdays 