If you missed my baseball blog about the Angels, please check it out here.  I’m going to have a blog tomorrow or Friday about end-of-regular-season collapses in major league baseball, but I promised my college football rankings blog tonight. So even though I got a bit distracted by the baseball, here it is.

I guess I need to put up front what I looked at here before getting into comments about the results this week. I compared undefeated teams ONLY on how good I think the opponents have been so far, with emphasis on the best opponent (meaning if I think it’s the best win anyone had all year, it might count for more than someone else beating two average teams). For teams with one or more loss, I mostly looked at what they did apart from that loss in a similar fashion, but of course there was some decision-making based on the quality of the team(s) that caused those losses.

Since I used this approach, the rankings this week will not be what I call internally consistent. For instance, I’m going to give Alabama a good bit of credit for beating Arkansas, but since Arkansas hasn’t beaten anyone, I won’t be ranking Arkansas. So I’m only allowing my subjective opinion about Arkansas to factor into their quality as an opponent, not their quality as a team for the purposes of ranking.

People have complained about my changing how I do things from week to week, but I believe that’s the logical way to transition from the purely subjective (“on paper”) preseason rankings to the purely objective rankings (results only…with opponents evaluated on results only as well), which I begin using in early October every year. Otherwise, what I would have to do is have the preseason rankings but not factor them in at all after week 1. Every team that beat an FBS opponent would be tied for first since all opponents would be the same 0-1. After Week 2, every team that was 2-0 with two 1-1 opponents would be tied for first, although I suppose I could add a requirement that those 1-1 opponents had to beat teams that were also 1-1 through two weeks.

Anyway, as far as last week, I feel vindicated with Temple’s win (which makes Penn St. look better) and by Notre Dame’s and Michigan’s wins (both of which make Michigan look better).

I can’t believe people thought I was ranking Big Ten teams too high, although obviously Wisconsin fans again aren’t going to be happy with me.

Continue reading...