Predicting The College Football Playoff Rankings: Week 14

Ohio State is out. What does the top 4 look like?

The College Football Playoffs this year are virtually guaranteed to be the most unique version since its inception in 2014. Clemson was eliminated long ago. Ohio State has now been eliminated after losing to Michigan. Oklahoma lost to Oklahoma State, lost their coach, and are out of the playoff. Georgia, Alabama and Notre Dame are the remaining teams left that have previous playoff experience, and the first two play each other in the SEC championship.

We have one more release of the playoff rankings after this week, but this week will tell us a lot about who controls their destiny. Who will be in a “win and you’re in” situation? Let’s break out the rankings prediction model and figure this out.

Reviewing Week 13 Predictions

In last weeks article, I disagreed with the model and thought Ohio State would jump Alabama in the rankings and they did. The model didn’t quite get the fall of Oregon after their loss to Utah, but other than that the model did quite well. Remember, the model uses quantile regression to predict the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile outcomes. If it doesn’t quite fall around the 50th percentile, it may still fall within the models range of outcomes.

Week 14 Predicted Rankings

Alabama should regain its number two spot in the rankings, setting up a No. 1 Georgia vs. No. 2 Alabama matchup in the SEC Championship. My model thinks there is a chance that Cincinnati could jump up to the 2nd spot, but that seems rather unlikely given the committees history. Similar to last week, I could see the model missing a potential Michigan jump up to 3 ahead of Cincinnati, after their win over their rival Ohio State.

It seems very unlikely the committee would put in a two loss Alabama team in over a 11-1 Notre Dame or a one loss Big 12 Champion Oklahoma State coming off wins against highly ranked Oklahoma and Baylor. Assuming Michigan wins, the question would then boil down to Notre Dame vs. Oklahoma State. Oklahoma State would have a conference championship on their resume, which would be a pretty easy argument over Notre Dame.

Potential Rankings Additions

Losses by UTSA, Wisconsin and Texas A&M should lead to some openings in the rankings. It seems the committee just does not want to rank any of the top Sun Belt conference teams, even though all three of the teams (Coastal, App State and Louisiana) deserve some consideration. If that trend continues, look for a team like Kentucky to join the rankings this week.

If you want to dive in to the data like I do, check out @CFB_Data and @cfbfastR on Twitter, where you can learn how to get started in the world of College Football data analysis!

If you want to see more charts and one off analysis, follow my twitter page, @CFBNumbers