2013 Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 10 Seedings

You'd think before writing last week's seedings I'd look closer at upcoming matchups.

I mentioned the ACC title game being between Miami and Florida State, not bothering to notice that they were playing each other on Saturday. This does in fact bring us down to seven unbeatens left in big time college football. Odds are at least one of these will fall, if not more, but I'm kind of hoping they all win out just to cause a mess at the top.

So in the meantime, we've played 10 weeks of the college season, and we just have the month of November left to get through. Looking a bit at schedules, I can see why BCS proponents make the regular season argument, because there are some really compelling matchups left on the docket, though I still think those matchups would be enhanced with Wetzel, Peter, and Passan's playoff system.

I remain a one-man selection committee, but like the first two weeks of seedings, I'm not going in totally blind. To aid my selections, I've been crunching numbers and pulling other numbers from other sources. Next to each team I have their seed from the previous week and a few metrics. "NCSS" stands for "Non-Conference Schedule Strength", and tries to objectively capture how well a team schedules its non-conference slate. A higher score correlates to (but isn't perfectly indicative of) a tougher schedule. "PP" stands for playoff points, and is basically the win total of all the teams a school beat. (Note: a school's win total includes wins over FCS teams, but you don't get any playoff points for actually beating them). "SAG" and "FACT" are computer rankings done by people who either currently or used to do them for the BCS and either were kicked out for using margin of victory (for FACT, created by the late David Rothman) or still use margin of victory in another formula, but have a "politically correct" version they send to the BCS (for SAG, created by Jeff Sagarin; the Death to the BCS Playoffs use the "PREDICTOR" rankings after using other, less accurate Sagarin rankings the first couple weeks). As a reference as well, current conference "champions" are based on conference record if the season ended today, with the tie being broken by overall record.

If you want to see how last week's seeds fell, you can see those here. Below are this week's updated seedings.


1. Florida State (8-0, ACC "Champion", LW: 3- PP: 34; NCSS: 0; SAG: 2nd; FACT: 1st)
2. Alabama (8-0, SEC "Champion", LW: 1- PP: 30; NCSS: 4; SAG: 1st; FACT: 3rd)
3. Oregon (8-0, Pac-12 "Champion", LW: 2- PP: 25; NCSS: 4; SAG: 3rd, FACT: 2nd)
4. Ohio State (9-0, Big Ten "Champion", LW: 4- PP: 32; NCSS: 4; SAG: 6th; FACT: 5th)
5. Baylor (7-0, At Large, LW: 5- PP: 26; NCSS: 1; SAG: 4th, FACT: 4th)
6. Stanford (7-1, At Large, LW: 6- PP: 35; NCSS: 3; SAG: 8th; FACT: 9th)
7. Missouri (8-1, At Large, LW: 7- PP: 29; NCSS: 4; SAG: 9th; FACT: 6th)
8. Auburn (8-1, At Large, LW: 8- PP: 30; NCSS: 2; SAG: 22nd; FACT: 10th)
9. Oklahoma (7-1, At Large, LW: 9- PP: 30; NCSS: 4; SAG: 18th; FACT: 23rd)
10. Clemson (8-1, At Large, LW: NR- PP: 26; NCSS: 1; SAG: 13th; FACT: 7th)
11. Northern Illinois (9-0, MAC "Champion", LW: 12- PP: 17; NCSS: 7; SAG: 54th; FACT: 27th)
12. Fresno State (8-0, MWC "Champion", LW: 13- PP: 24; NCSS: 3; SAG: 47th; FACT: 46th)
13. Texas (6-2, Big 12 "Champion", LW: NR- PP: 18; NCSS: 5; SAG: 25th; FACT: 29th)
14. Houston (7-1, AAC "Champion", LW: NR- PP: 19; NCSS: 3; SAG: 43rd; FACT: 40th)
15. East Carolina (6-2, C-USA "Champion", LW: NR- PP: 16; NCSS: 6; SAG: 57th; FACT: 55th)
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (6-2, Sun Belt "Champion", LW: 16- PP: 19; NCSS: 8; SAG: 72nd; FACT: 70th)

Out of the playoffs: Miami (FL) (10), Central Florida (11), Ball State (14), Tulane (15)

Most of the teams that dropped out did so by no fault of their own. Central Florida has played one fewer game than Houston; Tulane has played one more game (and lost it) than East Carolina (same with North Texas and Rice); and Ball State was a casualty of Texas having played one more game than Baylor, knocking the Bears out of the automatic berth, but being undefeated they get to stay in. Miami's loss to Florida State originally was going to keep them in, but I totally forgot about Clemson. The Tigers' NCSS is way weaker, but they have more playoff points and the computers like them way more.

The toughest outs for at-large berths? Besides Miami, I was looking seriously at Oklahoma State as another team. Michigan State is a little behind both of them, but they could still sneak in yet (those last 3 weeks are tough enough that winning out might be their ticket in depending on what else happens around the country). If you look at all those berths though, anti-playoff people should note something: the Big 12 and SEC each have three teams in, and the Pac-12 and ACC each have two. The three teams just on the outside are also from power conferences. This is probably how most of the at large seeds will fall most years. In fact, the last two years I've done a playoff in this format, the only at large berths that haven't gone to non-BCS conference teams have been last year's Notre Dame team (unbeaten in the regular season), and 2011 one-loss Boise State and Houston, so it's not like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Tomorrow I'll try to have schedule analysis for the upcoming week of games. Meanwhile, since it's an even-numbered week in the NFL it's my turn for Pigskin Pick 'Em, and I'll have those up on Thursday.