The Book 2016: Week 13

Just two more rankings to go and we will have our final College Football Playoff rankings and with it, the participants in the 3rd CFP as well as the New Year's Six Bowl games.  While the committee's top four of Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan and Clemson have not changed this week, neither has The Book's top four of Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Wisconsin.

If you watched the selection show tonight, the overarching theme was "Best vs Most Deserving" or to put it another way, "how do you define best?".  Maybe this will all work itself out in the wash, but this year more than the first two, there is a definite lack of transparency into how those decisions are being made and potentially ignorance of it's goal of selecting the four best teams comparing:  championships won, strength of schedule, head to head competition and comparative outcomes against common opponents.

There were clearly arguments on both sides and it is one of the reasons I believe the best way to do is indeed most deserving.  Otherwise, why play the games?  Now college football is not the NFL, but in the league, there is no discussion of whether a team is better than another and ignore the record, as Bill Parcells said, "you are what your record says you are".

Yes, the NFL schedule is unbalanced, but the level of unbalance is far less than what college football offers, but it will be an awfully bitter pill for say Penn State to endure should they win the Big Ten East, the Big Ten title and then see Ohio State in the playoff with them on the couch in State College, holding both the conference championship and the head to head against a team in their own division.

Another point to consider is the concept of how a committee views a win or loss against an opponent.   It is has been clearly expressed that a good win is weighed more heavily than a bad loss and at least up until tonight, when Kirby Hocutt referenced a Wisconsin win against an LSU team no longer in the committee's rankings as impressive, that was clear.  Which leads to those wins and losses against teams in the rankings as major factor in how teams are ultimately ranked.

I will argue that is not necessarily the right way to do it.

Teams change over the year, whether they evolve or devolve, sometimes through injury or just the way they are playing, looking at a team in the moment when you played them can't be overlooked.  For instance, a team wins a game against a good team, but while that team was playing a backup QB. Or hot teams, like Clemson's win over a smoking hot Louisville, who although still a strong win, won't look as good because the body of the work for the Cardinals has been devalued a bit with last week's loss to Houston.

Now The Book looks to quantify this and although I think it is something that is impossible to put a formula around, does a pretty good job of trying to address.  I am going to run another set of rankings for next week and see how this changes looking at a rank based on where teams are now as opposed to where they were at the time of the game, which is how things are calculated today, and see what we see for results and see how much more closely they match the committee's point of view.

With that I bring you Michigan.  Most everyone has Michigan ranked much higher than either our strength of record or power poll has with the Wolverines #3 across the CFP, Sagarin and Massey rankings.  For us though, it is a question of both who you played and when you played them.  Michigan never made it higher than number four in our rankings and then took a loss to what our power rankings viewed as the #48 team in the country in Iowa and took a tumble.  After that they beat an Indiana team ranked #59.  As most know, there isn't much of a differentiation between the top 10 teams or so after Alabama, but not getting a ton of credit for wins against Colorado (#41 at the time) or Penn State (#47 at the time) is what is most definitely preventing the Wolverines from ranking higher.  The other interesting thing about UM is that it's not just their strength of record, but their power ranking is also lower than one would expect.  Struggling as a big favorite against Michigan State and Indiana and losing to Iowa, didn't help.

UPDATE: I did run the other set of ratings, where we look at where teams are now as opposed to when the games were played and not surprisingly, one of the biggest benefactors, was Michigan.  Using this concept, Michigan moves from #9 to #4 in the base rankings and from #9 to #5 in the combined.

Boston College finishes the regular season in Winston-Salem against Wake Forest and the Book has done a pretty great job of predicting BC games this year, going 7-2-1 against the Vegas spread (no line for Wagner).  This week, The Book likes Wake Forest, with the Deacs giving 7.4 to BC with Vegas showing Wake a 3 1/2 point pick.

Enjoy the games and Go Eagles!

Note:  the Massey composite rankings are as of Tuesday evening, November 22.

Here is a week by week look at the CFP style top 4: