In honor of the playoff committee’s first rankings we rebuilt the method we use to project the committee’s choices at the end of the year. Tough to do algorithmically, given how much they consider and how little history we could draw on, but we didn’t do bad calling their first ranking (got the playoff four…
This week’s projections roll in with the same top 10 teams as last week. That means we were never sold on Michigan and we’re still not sold on Notre Dame. Nothing against the Irish – they crack our power rankings top 10 for the first time this week – but they have a tough road…
Passing along this week’s projections. For a full write-up see Monday’s Washington Post column. We have 10 teams with >20% of making the playoff. It’s very close to the top 2 from each of the Power-5 conferences, except that the Big-10 has 3 and the Pac-12 only 1. At the top end we see two,…
A quick look at the biggest surprise teams of the season so far. We judge this by how much we’ve revised our ratings about them, up or down. UCF, Purdue and North Texas top the list, while Missouri, Brigham Young and Bowling Green bottom it out. These ratings incorporate our priors, so are “dampened” relative…
A quick look at our projections for the rest of the season. These blend our usual power rankings and season simulation with a model of the playoff committee’s selection process (while recognizing lots of uncertainty about that process – see last week’s post for more detail). Tight week so little commentary here. It’s all Bama…
We’ve extended our sim to include the conference championships, committee selections, and playoff outcomes. This is a blend of two kinds of uncertainty – our usual power-rank based methodology and speculation about playoff committee politics. We model both and try to be transparent about which inputs are objective and which are subjective. In this summary…
Our latest end-of-season projections (focusing on our “In The Conversation” metric). The aim is to project the teams we’ll be discussing as we head into the conference championships. Predictive analysts are like the grizzled old scouts in cowboy movies. Spend days on their own, working through signs, keeping track of threats too far away for the…
A quick look at our latest end-of-season projections (focusing on our “In The Conversation” metric). The aim, as always, is to project the teams we’ll be discussing as we head into the conference championships. Remember when the playoff committee released their initial rankings in 2014 – the first ever – leading with Mississippi State as…
A quick look at our latest end-of-season projections (focusing on our “In The Conversation” metric). The aim, as always, is to project the teams we’ll be discussing as we head into the conference championships. The field held steady this week, with the same 11 teams making up the potential playoff pool. Alabama, Michigan and Clemson are…
A quick look at our latest end-of-season projections (focusing on our “In The Conversation” metric). The aim, as always, is to project the teams we’ll be discussing as we head into the conference championships. The field shortened again this week, now down to only 11 teams with at least a 10% of being in the…