Power
Rankings After Week 5
1. Alabama 5-0 (1st)
2. Oregon 5-0 (2nd)
3. Florida State 5-0 (4th)
4. LSU 5-0 (3rd)
5. Georgia 5-0 (5th)
6. South Carolina 5-0 (7th)
7. Texas 4-0 (6th)
8. USC 3-1 (9th)
9. Florida 4-0 (10th)
10. Kansas State 4-0
(11th)
11. Oklahoma 2-1 (12th)
12. Notre Dame 4-0 (13th)
13. Oregon State 3-0 (NR)
14. West Virginia 4-0
(14th)
15. Clemson 4-1 (15th)
Out:
Stanford (8th).
Comments:
It seems like my power rankings are beginning to stabilize. There was still
movement in my rankings this week, as 10 of 15 spots experienced change. But
after switching out just 2 teams last week there was only 1 new team in my
rankings this week. In addition, all 7 of the teams moving up my rankings this
week moved up just 1 spot. Only 3 teams dropped in my rankings this week and
only 1 team fell more than 1 spot.
LSU dropped 1 spot for
the second week in a row after another unimpressive win, this time moving down
from #3 to #4.
Texas also fell 1 spot
this week, moving down from #6 to #7 despite beating a tough Oklahoma State
squad on the road. This may be the most “controversial” aspect of my power
rankings this week, as it doesn’t seem to make sense that I would drop a team
down a spot following their best win of the year. However, while Texas’ road
victory over the Cowboys was a good win, they didn’t exactly win convincingly
against an Ok State team that lost to Arizona by 21 and was playing with an
inexperienced backup QB.
In fact, Texas was
fortunate to come out on top, and you could make the argument that they should have
lost. This is especially so when you consider that Texas’ winning touchdown
appeared to be the result of a blown call on a play that should have resulted
in Oklahoma State recovering a fumble at their own goal line with less than a
minute to play and the lead.
While LSU and Texas
remained in my top 7, Stanford took the biggest fall this week and they were
the only team to fall out of my top 15, dropping out of the rankings from #8.
Stanford’s case exposes
one of the inherent flaws present in most ranking systems. I’ve always disliked
the way that traditional polls—while created by humans—often seem to rank the
teams without much thought involved. The preseason rankings come out and then
throughout the season teams seem to shift and rotate inside—or in and out of—the
rankings based on the most recent results. I’ve tried to construct my power
rankings differently, looking at more than just the previous week’s wins and
losses.
Inevitably, however, it’s
almost impossible not to fall into the “Team-A beat Team-B and I think Team-B
is X-spot so I have to put Team-A in Y-spot” trap. Did that confuse you? Well,
don’t worry. I’m certainly not that worried about it because, hey, you don’t
actually exist, but I’m gonna make it clearer for you anyway.
As I mentioned, the
rapid rise and abrupt fall of Stanford in and out of the top 15 is an example
of one of the flaws of ranking teams. Since these are my rankings I’m just
going to speak for myself, but in general this flaw affects all week-to-week
power rankings which are based on current opinion or feeling of how strong a
team is.
I thought Stanford
would be a good team this year but I wasn’t expecting them to be one of the top
teams in the country. On the other hand, I fully expected USC to be one of the
best teams in football this season along with Alabama and LSU. This strong
belief was shaken when Stanford defeated USC and did so by shutting down their
offense and “out-physicaling” the Trojans.
This result obviously
surprised me but I still felt like USC was one of the best teams in the
country. At the same time, I wasn’t sold on Stanford. This created a dilemma. I
wasn’t going to completely change my opinion of USC and throw them out of the
top 15 all together. Likewise, while I thought Stanford was better than I had
previously believed, I hadn’t totally changed my mind and accepted that they
were one of the best teams in the country.
The problem was that wherever
I ended up placing USC, it seemed almost illogical not to place Stanford at
least close to them. Again, this is a problem that occurs all the time in any
sort of current opinion poll or ranking system. The unsatisfactory solution was
a sort of compromise. Because it seems so hard to justify ranking a team much
lower than another team that you just saw them beat there only appear to be two
choices.
In this case, I could
either react drastically to USC’s loss and drop them out of the rankings; or I
could react drastically to Stanford’s win and vault them into the rankings. It’s
one compromise or the other. I ended up going with the scenario that seemed
more likely to be close to the truth: that USC was indeed a very good team and
Stanford is much better than expected. That seemed easier to believe than the
opposite: that Stanford isn’t drastically better than I thought but USC is not
a great team either.
Thus, I dropped USC
from #3 to #9 and placed Stanford in my rankings, 1 spot ahead of them at #8.
While I felt much more certain about USC than Stanford, in my mind I simply
couldn’t justify one without the other.
This problem occurs in
any sort of current opinion based rankings several times a year, particularly
early on in the season when we have little on the field evidence to balance
against expectations. Later in the year it becomes less of a problem. An
example of this would be Oklahoma State’s stunning loss to Iowa State late last
season. At that point we had seen enough to know that Oklahoma State was elite
and that Iowa State was a pretty good team. We’d seen enough to be able to put
the latest result in perspective and we didn’t find it illogical to keep
Oklahoma State ranked much, much higher than Iowa State despite that most
recent outcome.
So that was a bit of a
tangent, but I do think it illustrates one of the ways that our current feeling
based rankings are flawed. To bring it back to this week’s power rankings, in
my mind, Stanford’s loss to Washington provided evidence that Stanford (you
know what’s coming) was who I thought they were: a good team but not one of the
best.
With this in mind, I
dropped Stanford out of my rankings from #8 this week. They were the only team
to fall out of my top 15 this week.
Oregon State—who has
played fewer games than most teams due to the postponement of their opener and
an early bye week—moves into the rankings this week at #13.
The first two spots in
my top 15 and the final two spots in my top 15 stayed the same this week, with
Alabama holding the #1 spot for a fifth consecutive week. So far Alabama
appears to be on a different level than the rest of the sport.
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