WSOP bracelet winner, EPT & PGT champion, 2x Circa Survivor winner. Founding partner & Director of Research at a quant hedge fund.
New York, NY
Joined June 2009
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COLLEGE FOOTBALL WEEK 10 UNBIASED RATINGS
A rating system has three components:
POWER - How good is the team?
RESUME - How good are their wins/losses?
EXTRA - H2H & Conf championships
You can combine these ideas however you like, but you should be consistent. If Notre Dame and Kentucky played tomorrow, the Irish would be a double digit favorite. They have a better power rating. But Kentucky's resume is fantastic, going 7-1 against tough opposition, while ND hasn't beaten anybody. They have a better resume. It's up to you how to trade those things off.
Personally, if I had a vote, I would just submit Resume rankings every week, but what I have done here is try to weigh the two concepts in a way that approximates what I think pollsters try to do intuitively.
The formula is (power rating + (1/resume)*4, switch adjacent teams for h2h).
How do I come up with these numbers? POWER - Vegas knows power than anybody else, so I have a Vegas approximation algorithm I run that combines this week's lines, next week's lines, injuries, prior lines and win totals to extrapolate how good Vegas thinks teams are. This works VERY well for the NFL and decently for CFB. (Within conference is easy, but between conferences has some noise).
If you think Vegas is wrong, please just go become extremely rich.
I have chosen to use the power of how good teams currently are (i.e. inclusive of injuries) although elsewhere I also project playoff power with players returning, bayesian results, etc.
RESUME - How likely is the #12 team to achieve the same record that you did or better against your schedule?
COMMITEE PREDICTIONS:
I think the committee will be higher on:
Ole Miss (12)
Kentucky (8)
Texas (10)
Wake Forest (14)
South Carolina (23)
Florida (25)
I think the committee will be lower on:
Notre Dame (4)
New Mexico (22)
Alabama (9)
My best guess:
1Miami
2Georgia
3Utah
4Indiana
5UCLA
6Kentucky
7BYU
8Notre Dame
9Texas
10Ole Miss
11Ohio State
12Alabama
13Wake Forest
14LSU
15Texas Tech
16USC
17Tennessee
18Missouri
19Houston
20Iowa
21South Carolina
22Arizona
23Boise State
24Florida
25New Mexico
Galen Hall retweeted
Lamar Jackson has 8 documented injuries since 2021.
All 8 of those injuries have occurred behind the line of scrimmage and either in the pocket or while attempting to escape pressure within the pocket.
These dang running QBs are just so dang injury prone.
BYU correctly going for it on 4th and 1 on their own 13 with 5 minutes in the game while up 3. Gets it and then immediately rewarded by completing a 60 yard bomb. LFG MATH
You can combine these concepts however you like, but be consistent. If you want to rate Kentucky highly, then you must also do so for UCLA and Utah. If you want to rate Notre Dame highly, then you must also do so for LSU and Georgia.
Here's the list sorted by power/resume:
Here's how I would rank teams if I had a vote.
Kentucky's resume is really good because they've played 5 SEC teams, none of whom are Arkansas or Vanderbilt, and 3 were on the road.
They have 4 wins in games that the #12 team would win 65% of the time or less. Two-loss Florida has 3 such wins, Georgia Ohio State and Texas each have 2, and nobody else has more than 1.
OSU's power rating is dicey, we don't have a game or a line sans Sayin yet. The top 9 teams are within 5.5 points of each other.
People are big mad about Bama over Tennessee. It's surprising to me too. My rankings are a combination of Vegas power rating and my resume calculation, with a bonus for h2h (or later conf champs) when teams are close together.
Tennessee has a better resume and beat them H2H. But Bama's power ranking is so much better that it H2H doesn't get them close enough to matter (i.e. the same reason Auburn is not ranked ahead of UGA or Mizzou is not ahead of UF).
Vegas just does not think Tennessee is very good - for example, they are 2.5 point dogs to South Carolina this week, and the sum of their rolling spreads and win total imply a surprisingly low rating. That's all there is to it.
Also, if I ACTUALLY had a vote, I would probably just submit the resume rankings every week. Notre Dame at #19 is a lot more fun to defend than Tennessee at #15 becuase Vegas hates them.
The notion that I would pay a bribe and only reap a tiny fraction of the benefit of that bribe and let everybody else freeroll is almost more offensive than the idea that I would bribe in the first place.
JAX kicking a FG there is a big mistake. It's too easy for HOU to get a FG of their own. Need to go for it both because you can now get a TD and win, and also bc if you end up kicking a FG, there is less (or no) time to counter.
Because of survivor, I end up watching 3 screens of the Dolphins, Browns and Jets every Sunday. Forgot how fun it is to watch two elite teams go at it.
That's a bad rule. The rule must have been made with logical coherence in mind, not legislative capacity. It doesn't matter if a rule is coherent if it is literally impossible to legislate. Fine rule if you have a blimp with zoom, otherwise bad.