Of course, the drawback for this is that I need to reevaluate my playoff seedings, which takes a little bit of work. Granted, I've been updating my numbers weekly, so that part isn't new, but needing to shift teams around is also a responsibility I need to take. Every week I've had to do some shifting around, some weeks more than others. This might be one of the more chaotic weeks. And last week was pretty chaotic.
As a refresher, the 16 team field is made up of the ten conference champions, plus six teams selected "at large", then seeded in regular fashion. The official criteria to select at large teams and seed the field isn't concrete, but is based off of a mixture of Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS, most recent data for conferences can be found here), Playoff Points (PP, basically the total number of wins of the teams you've beat), and computer rankings based on formulas created by Jeff Sagarin (SAG, found here, but I'm retweaking based on a closer reading of Sagarin's header and using the official "rating" column as his ranking, as it is a synthesis of his two other score-based rankings) and the late David Rothman (FACT, compiled by someone from UCLA, which can be found here). I also peer over schedules and try to decide as best I can how things should be seeded So without further ado, here's how I would seed a playoff if the season ended today.
1. Florida State (11-0, ACC "Champion", LW: 1- PP: 54; NCSS: 1; SAG: 1st; FACT: 1st)
2. Alabama (11-0, SEC "Champion", LW: 2- PP: 49; NCSS: 3; SAG: 2nd; FACT: 2nd)
3. Ohio State (11-0, Big Ten "Champion", LW: 3- PP: 51; NCSS: 4; SAG: 6th; FACT: 3rd)
4. Oklahoma State (10-1, Big 12 "Champion", LW: 10- PP: 49; NCSS: 3; SAG: 10th; FACT: 13th)
5. Missouri (10-1, At Large, LW: 7- PP: 47; NCSS: 4; SAG: 8th; FACT: 4th)
6. Auburn (10-1, At Large, LW: 8- PP: 51; NCSS: 3; SAG: 16th; FACT: 8th)
7. Arizona State (9-2, Pac-12 "Champion", LW: 11- PP: 53; NCSS: 2; SAG: 7th; FACT: 6th)
8. Stanford (9-2, At Large, LW: 5- PP: 54; NCSS: 3; SAG: 9th; FACT: 9th)
9. Northern Illinois (11-0, MAC "Champion", LW: 12- PP: 41; NCSS: 7; SAG: 37th; FACT: 16th)
10. Fresno State (10-0, MWC "Champion", LW: 13- PP: 38; NCSS: 3; SAG: 53rd; FACT: 46th)
11. Baylor (9-1, At Large, LW: 4- PP: 44; NCSS: 1; SAG: 5th, FACT: 11th)
12. Clemson (10-1, At Large, LW: 9- PP: 40; NCSS: 0; SAG: 13th; FACT: 5th)
13. Michigan State (10-1, At Large, LW: NR- PP: 38; NCSS: 4; SAG: 15th, FACT: 14th)
14. Central Florida (9-1, American Athletic "Champion", LW: 14- PP: 38; NCSS: 8; SAG: 33rd; FACT: 29th)
15. East Carolina (9-2, C-USA "Champion", LW: 15- PP: 35; NCSS: 9; SAG: 47th; FACT: 53rd)
16. Louisiana-Lafayette (8-2, Sun Belt "Champion", LW: 16- PP: 30; NCSS: 8; SAG: 74th; FACT: 74th)
Out of the playoffs: Oregon (6)
Tough luck for the Ducks. I'm valuing MSU's only losing one game and having run the table in B1G play so far over a two-loss team who lost to a mediocre Arizona team this week. The Spartans have been on my radar for a couple weeks now, and Oregon's second loss opened that door. I tossed them over 2-loss Stanford based on that head-to-head matchup.
Seeding wise, I have to value the undefeated marks of NIU and Fresno State to an extent, and I feel bad that I have a pair of two loss teams out of the Pac-12 ahead of them, but then have some one-loss at large teams behind them. For me, I'm justifying it based on way higher playoff point totals for those Pac-12 squads compared to only slightly higher ones for the others. It's tough. Conference title matchups will help solve some of these problems in a couple weeks thankfully, but if NIU and Fresno State both run the table, it will make for fun times. I like my top and bottom of my brackets; it's the middle that's the tricky part.
On Tuesday I'll try to have a runthrough of the second to last week of the regular season. I think we're done with cupcakes at this point finally, but not before a lot of teams got a sweet tooth. I'll have that full report tomorrow.
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