#2 PSU
#3 OSU
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2018/8/29/17795292/strength-of-schedule-rankings-2018-sos
1. I hate strength of schedule arguments, partly because of the contradiction. Let me explain.
In my work with advanced stats — the S&P+ ratings and so forth — I field certain insults frequently. Here are two of the most common:
The second says to watch one particular game and ignore the others.
2. Football’s going to have a sample size issue no matter what, so we should milk meaning out of every game.
Arguing about strength of schedule the wrong way means limiting the sample even further and acting like we can’t learn from every play of every game.
We can. Honest.
Strength of schedule is at the heart of virtually every argument between October and January. Hell, it’s a point of debate for every college sport. The schedules are too varied and not comprehensive enough.
At the pro level, there are strong and weak divisions, but schedules are infinitely more balanced. In the MLB, everybody plays everybody in their league at least a few times, with some cross-league games. In the NBA and NHL, everybody plays everybody at least once.
With 130 FBS teams and 12 games, that isn’t an option for college football. So we play who we play, and we yell about whom our rivals ain’t played.
3. Strength of schedule determines the national champion, sort of.
College football’s national title is more directly affected by strength of schedule than that of any other major sport. It’s baked into the Playoff selection process.
When circumstances at the margins indicate that teams are comparable, then the following criteria must be considered:
* Championships won
* Strength of schedule
* Head-to-head competition (if it occurred)
* Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)
We believe that a committee of experts properly instructed (based on beliefs that the regular season is unique and must be preserved; and that championships won on the field and strength of schedule are important values that much be incorporated into the selection process) has very strong support throughout the college football community.
It is decreed that the committee takes strength of schedule into account, but it doesn’t say how. It frowns on advanced analytics and gives no alternative guidance. So the committee goes with things like “wins over top-25 teams” and “assuring there’s no way in hell a team from a Group of 5 conference will get in.”
4. By now, though, some are figuring out how strength of schedule is taken into account.
ESPN’s stats team has created both forward- and backward-looking measures to assess the difference between the “best” teams and those determined most deserving of a title shot. As it turns out, the Strength of Record backward view — or judging your team by whom you’ve beaten, not by how good you are — is effective at mirroring committee action.
Despite the committee’s mantra of selecting the “four best teams in the country,” it appears that in the first two years of playoff selection, the committee favored team accomplishment over team strength. So if you are trying to predict what the committee will do, take a look at strength of record, because seven of eight teams to make the playoff ranked in the top four of that metric before playoff selection.
The committee insists it is looking for the “best” team. It is not. Kirby Hocutt, former chairman of the CFP committee, conflated “best” and “most deserving” on a number of occasions. An example:
Q: Are you looking for the four best teams or the four most-deserving teams? Is there a difference?
A: You have to take into account the entire season. The season doesn’t start in October. Everybody has 12 regular-season opportunities, and the committee is watching. At the end of the year, we want to make sure we have the four very best teams over the course of the entire season.
They do not. And that’s fine, I guess.
5. Two major problems: a one-point win is not a 24-point win, and you don’t have to wait ‘til someone plays a good team to start learning.
Take these two old articles as an example.
Here I am in Oct. 2013, writing about how that year’s Florida State had long been elite, despite a weaker schedule.
”Are they tested?” is just a box you check. While you can find examples of teams that look great against awful teams, then stumble when punched in the mouth, you can usually glean just as much from how a team dominates bad competition as from how it plays against really good teams. Picking Team A simply because it is more tested than Team B is usually a recipe for making bad picks.
The early-season stats suggested that, despite not playing a top team yet, Florida State was pretty incredible. The Seminoles went out and left no doubt on Saturday night in Clemson.
Here I am a year later writing the opposite, about how 2014 FSU was probably doomed despite wins over good teams.
The most likely championship teams are the ones that handle their business early and put games out of reach before luck, chance, fumbles, and offensive pass interference calls can impact the outcome.
According to the F/+ rankings, the Seminoles have been just barely good enough to survive No. 9 Clemson at home (without Jameis Winston), No. 15 Louisville on the road, and No. 19 Notre Dame at home. They survived No. 44 Oklahoma State on a neutral field, and they pulled away from No. 53 NC State in the fourth quarter. They pummeled No. 76 Syracuse and got around to doing the same to No. 89 Wake Forest.
They have solidified that they should be ranked around seventh to 12th in these ratings. Without sustained improvement, they will in no way be a favorite to beat two top-four teams in the Playoff.
The 2013 team that hadn’t played nobody, but that was destroying its opponents, won the national title.
The 2014 team that was winning, but not impressing the numbers, eked out a Playoff bid and got embarrassed. (To its credit, the CFP committee did dock FSU a bit for its lackluster performance.)
These two FSU teams are examples for this simple truism:
6. You can learn something from every game, if you try.
Explaining S&P+, college football’s deepest advanced analytics system[/paste:font]
That’s the point of using advanced stats, be it S&P+ or any other. You set the baseline depending on the opponent(s), and you compare actual output to that adjusted expectation.
It fills in what your eyes are missing. (And with 800-plus college football games in a season, your eyes are always missing something.)
Your record does matter. Even as an advanced stats loyalist, I’m not going to call for a three-loss team to get a CFP spot, even if said team was unlucky in every loss and ranks first in S&P+. Wins and losses aren’t particularly predictive in and of themselves, but they have to mean something.
The best team shouldn’t get in, if it’s not high on the most-deserving list.
7. So what if we tried to combine the two? What if we used a “best” measure to approximate what “most deserving” means?
What if we took the Strength of Record idea and added an extra level of team quality? Let’s reintroduce Résumé S&P+, which made its debut here in 2017.
Below are each FBS team’s rankings in three categories:
8. With a month’s worth of 2018 data, let’s begin to check out what Résumé S&P+ can tell us. Let’s look at Alabama, the top-ranked team per S&P+, as an example.
The Tide are an easy 4-0 so far, having won four games by an average margin of 41 points (39.8 with a 50-point cap on each game).
Have they played a rigorous schedule? Not really — if the average top-five team played Alabama’s four opponents a countless number of times, it would have won about 90 percent of those games. That’s a strength of schedule that ranks 47th.
Still, the average top-five team would have won these games by an average of 24.9 points. That’s a massive difference.
Alabama’s plus-14.9 rating in Résumé S&P+ (the plus-39.8 adjusted scoring margin minus the 24.9-point expected margin) is 12.4 points ahead of second-place Penn State, which eked by a very good Appalachian State (20th in S&P+) and obliterated Pitt, Kent State, and Illinois. Ohio State (plus-1.9) and Georgia (plus-0.5) are the only other teams above zero.
9. Here are Résumé S&P+ strength of schedule ratings for everyone.
(This is a wide table, because it has to be; if it’s not showing well on your phone, consider taking a look on another device later.)
#3 OSU
https://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2018/8/29/17795292/strength-of-schedule-rankings-2018-sos
1. I hate strength of schedule arguments, partly because of the contradiction. Let me explain.
In my work with advanced stats — the S&P+ ratings and so forth — I field certain insults frequently. Here are two of the most common:
- “Watch the games, nerd!” The insinuation: if you’d get your nose out of the spreadsheets, dork, you’d see that Team A is better than Team B.
- “Team A ain’t played nobody!” The insinuation: How could Team A be any good when they haven’t played a team that clears someone’s arbitrary bar of goodness?
The second says to watch one particular game and ignore the others.
2. Football’s going to have a sample size issue no matter what, so we should milk meaning out of every game.
Arguing about strength of schedule the wrong way means limiting the sample even further and acting like we can’t learn from every play of every game.
We can. Honest.
Strength of schedule is at the heart of virtually every argument between October and January. Hell, it’s a point of debate for every college sport. The schedules are too varied and not comprehensive enough.
At the pro level, there are strong and weak divisions, but schedules are infinitely more balanced. In the MLB, everybody plays everybody in their league at least a few times, with some cross-league games. In the NBA and NHL, everybody plays everybody at least once.
With 130 FBS teams and 12 games, that isn’t an option for college football. So we play who we play, and we yell about whom our rivals ain’t played.
3. Strength of schedule determines the national champion, sort of.
College football’s national title is more directly affected by strength of schedule than that of any other major sport. It’s baked into the Playoff selection process.
When circumstances at the margins indicate that teams are comparable, then the following criteria must be considered:
* Championships won
* Strength of schedule
* Head-to-head competition (if it occurred)
* Comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)
We believe that a committee of experts properly instructed (based on beliefs that the regular season is unique and must be preserved; and that championships won on the field and strength of schedule are important values that much be incorporated into the selection process) has very strong support throughout the college football community.
It is decreed that the committee takes strength of schedule into account, but it doesn’t say how. It frowns on advanced analytics and gives no alternative guidance. So the committee goes with things like “wins over top-25 teams” and “assuring there’s no way in hell a team from a Group of 5 conference will get in.”
4. By now, though, some are figuring out how strength of schedule is taken into account.
ESPN’s stats team has created both forward- and backward-looking measures to assess the difference between the “best” teams and those determined most deserving of a title shot. As it turns out, the Strength of Record backward view — or judging your team by whom you’ve beaten, not by how good you are — is effective at mirroring committee action.
Despite the committee’s mantra of selecting the “four best teams in the country,” it appears that in the first two years of playoff selection, the committee favored team accomplishment over team strength. So if you are trying to predict what the committee will do, take a look at strength of record, because seven of eight teams to make the playoff ranked in the top four of that metric before playoff selection.
The committee insists it is looking for the “best” team. It is not. Kirby Hocutt, former chairman of the CFP committee, conflated “best” and “most deserving” on a number of occasions. An example:
Q: Are you looking for the four best teams or the four most-deserving teams? Is there a difference?
A: You have to take into account the entire season. The season doesn’t start in October. Everybody has 12 regular-season opportunities, and the committee is watching. At the end of the year, we want to make sure we have the four very best teams over the course of the entire season.
They do not. And that’s fine, I guess.
5. Two major problems: a one-point win is not a 24-point win, and you don’t have to wait ‘til someone plays a good team to start learning.
Take these two old articles as an example.
Here I am in Oct. 2013, writing about how that year’s Florida State had long been elite, despite a weaker schedule.
”Are they tested?” is just a box you check. While you can find examples of teams that look great against awful teams, then stumble when punched in the mouth, you can usually glean just as much from how a team dominates bad competition as from how it plays against really good teams. Picking Team A simply because it is more tested than Team B is usually a recipe for making bad picks.
The early-season stats suggested that, despite not playing a top team yet, Florida State was pretty incredible. The Seminoles went out and left no doubt on Saturday night in Clemson.
Here I am a year later writing the opposite, about how 2014 FSU was probably doomed despite wins over good teams.
The most likely championship teams are the ones that handle their business early and put games out of reach before luck, chance, fumbles, and offensive pass interference calls can impact the outcome.
According to the F/+ rankings, the Seminoles have been just barely good enough to survive No. 9 Clemson at home (without Jameis Winston), No. 15 Louisville on the road, and No. 19 Notre Dame at home. They survived No. 44 Oklahoma State on a neutral field, and they pulled away from No. 53 NC State in the fourth quarter. They pummeled No. 76 Syracuse and got around to doing the same to No. 89 Wake Forest.
They have solidified that they should be ranked around seventh to 12th in these ratings. Without sustained improvement, they will in no way be a favorite to beat two top-four teams in the Playoff.
The 2013 team that hadn’t played nobody, but that was destroying its opponents, won the national title.
The 2014 team that was winning, but not impressing the numbers, eked out a Playoff bid and got embarrassed. (To its credit, the CFP committee did dock FSU a bit for its lackluster performance.)
These two FSU teams are examples for this simple truism:
6. You can learn something from every game, if you try.
Explaining S&P+, college football’s deepest advanced analytics system[/paste:font]
That’s the point of using advanced stats, be it S&P+ or any other. You set the baseline depending on the opponent(s), and you compare actual output to that adjusted expectation.
It fills in what your eyes are missing. (And with 800-plus college football games in a season, your eyes are always missing something.)
Your record does matter. Even as an advanced stats loyalist, I’m not going to call for a three-loss team to get a CFP spot, even if said team was unlucky in every loss and ranks first in S&P+. Wins and losses aren’t particularly predictive in and of themselves, but they have to mean something.
The best team shouldn’t get in, if it’s not high on the most-deserving list.
7. So what if we tried to combine the two? What if we used a “best” measure to approximate what “most deserving” means?
What if we took the Strength of Record idea and added an extra level of team quality? Let’s reintroduce Résumé S&P+, which made its debut here in 2017.
Below are each FBS team’s rankings in three categories:
- S&P+, an overall team efficiency rating system you can read more about here. It can be used to predict wins and losses going forward.
- Strength of Schedule (SOS), which amounts to how well the average top-five team (according to S&P+) would fare, in terms of win percentage, against your schedule. The lower the number, the harder the schedule. Why top-five? Because we’re using the Playoff’s four-team field as a target, and usually only about five teams have solid playoff cases.
- Résumé S&P+, which looks at a team’s season scoring margin* and compares it to what the average top-five team’s scoring margin would’ve likely been against that schedule. If the number is positive, that team is faring better then the typical top-five team would be. Instead of advanced stats or win probability info, I’m adhering toactual margins.
8. With a month’s worth of 2018 data, let’s begin to check out what Résumé S&P+ can tell us. Let’s look at Alabama, the top-ranked team per S&P+, as an example.
The Tide are an easy 4-0 so far, having won four games by an average margin of 41 points (39.8 with a 50-point cap on each game).
Have they played a rigorous schedule? Not really — if the average top-five team played Alabama’s four opponents a countless number of times, it would have won about 90 percent of those games. That’s a strength of schedule that ranks 47th.
Still, the average top-five team would have won these games by an average of 24.9 points. That’s a massive difference.
Alabama’s plus-14.9 rating in Résumé S&P+ (the plus-39.8 adjusted scoring margin minus the 24.9-point expected margin) is 12.4 points ahead of second-place Penn State, which eked by a very good Appalachian State (20th in S&P+) and obliterated Pitt, Kent State, and Illinois. Ohio State (plus-1.9) and Georgia (plus-0.5) are the only other teams above zero.
9. Here are Résumé S&P+ strength of schedule ratings for everyone.
(This is a wide table, because it has to be; if it’s not showing well on your phone, consider taking a look on another device later.)
