Staturdays

College Football

  • Week 15 Elo Rankings

    Week 15 Elo Rankings

    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.

  • Updated Preseason College Football Rankings

    Updated Preseason College Football Rankings

    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.

    Updated Top 25 rankings in Elo Rating.

    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.

    Full Rankings For All Teams

    The entire rankings based on Elo Rating for all 77 teams.

    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.

  • We Need to Get Better … as Fans

    I don’t know who needs to read this and I hate to break it to you but your opinion sucks and it is wrong. You’ve managed to convince yourself that you found the one reason Penn State lost this football game and it is an argument you won’t budge from no matter what. You are so angry that PSU got upset by Minnesota so you and your brilliant football mind were able to calculate the one big reason that the Nittany Lions weren’t able to get it done.

    Congratulations! You did it! You, in hindsight, were able to decipher why Penn State lost this game and took to the internet to let everyone know. Ricky Rahne (whose last name you’ve probably been pronouncing ‘Rain’) is your culprit, right? Or is it James Franklin, who despite bringing Vanderbilt to its first 9-win season since 1914 and being one of the two active coaches to have won a B1G championship, who needs to be fired immediately? Maybe Sean Clifford needs to be benched and it is time to give Will Levis a chance because “you don’t like what you’ve been seeing out of him”? Brent Pry is overrated and hasn’t been able to coach a half-coherent secondary in his tenure at Penn State, right?

    Give it up. You don’t know what you’re talking about and your emotional tweeting after a loss makes for some cringe-worthy and anger inducing content following an already horrible afternoon. Everything you think is probably right in some ways and completely wrong in all the others. You do not know what goes into scheming for a game. You do not know the different intricacies of every play and what went right and what didn’t. You DEFINITELY don’t know what goes into being a head coach of a football team and you don’t have a better option in mind should our current head coach leave or get fired.

    The Nittany Lions are 8-1 and thousands of tweets have been sent to James Franklin encouraging him to pack his bags and go coach at USC as if that is going to be a solution. And I am not telling you not to be upset at this loss. Many people will say “Well if you said that we’d be 8-1 back in August you’d take it right?” – but I won’t. I understand that context matters and I certainly understand more than the next guy how heartbreaking it is to be ranked #4 for the first time in PSU history under the new CFP system just to have your dreams crushed 4 days later. But what we all need to understand is that winning in College Football is really hard. Only one team can win it all every year and only 4 of 130 can make the playoff. This Penn State program is right on the precipice of that and blowing up the ship because of a minor let-down is borderline insane.

    We need to, as a fan base, step back and take a look at the state of this program. Is there a problem playing ranked teams on the road? Yes. Is Penn State recruiting elite talent and developing NFL prospects and hanging in the top 10 perennially? Also, yes. You tweeting at James Franklin telling him to kick rocks or fire his staff doesn’t help anything. Sending tweets out that “PSU will never win under these XYZ coaches” isn’t really saying anything. It isn’t impressive to say that this one team out of 130 isn’t going to be the best, that is just you playing the odds (99.23% to be exact) and hedging your happiness by trying to “right” instead of positive. Your emotions only serve as a way for you to vent and don’t actually help anything and don’t actually change the outcomes of games and quite frankly nobody wants to see or hear it.

    I’m pissed. I was heartbroken this Saturday afternoon and I haven’t really gotten over it yet. I watched a game that had just about everything go wrong for my team and it still wasn’t until the last offensive play of the game that it was officially over. I am freaking out over this Indiana game because a win or a loss is the difference between any sliver of hope and a complete waste of a once promising season. I’m also extremely thankful that people who are much smarter and better at football than me are the ones taking control of winning next week and all I have to do is watch. I suggest you do the same. We are, 8-1.