2015 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 9

We're onto yet another week of college football, and hopefully after this weekend I can start building a mock bracket for the Death to the BCS Playoffs.

Conference play has done a pretty good job of weeding out a lot of the remaining undefeated teams, and it will continue to do so as we get down the home stretch, but there are still a fair number of non-conference games left on the docket. Last week only had a couple games that really impacted any of the numbers, but a couple weeks are coming that will really throw a monkey wrench into the rankings.

After the jump I will rank each conference based on its cumulative Non Conference Schedule Strength average, including this week's score and a comparison to where they stood last week.

1. Conference USA: 0.00; 6.25 (LW: 1). No change.
2. MAC: 0.00; 6.15 (LW: 2). No change. 
3. Sun Belt: 0.00; 5.64 (LW: 3). No change. 
4. American Athletic: 0.25; 5.42 (LW: 5). Houston hosts Vanderbilt and Temple hosts Notre Dame.
5. Mountain West: 0.00; 5.25 (LW: 4). No change. 
6. Big Ten: 0.00; 4.93 (LW: 6). No change.
7. Pac-12: 0.00; 3.33 (LW: 7). No change. 
8. ACC: 0.00; 3.07 (LW: 8). No change. 
9. Big XII: 0.00; 3.00 (LW: 9). No change. 
10. SEC: 0.07; 2.64 (LW: 10). Vanderbilt visits Houston, but Arkansas hosts an FCS team.

Photo by Robert Franklin (South Bend Tribune)

If you want to see the updated rankings, you can view them here.All the blue zeroes indicate conference games, while black zeroes are bye weeks. Regarding the independents, Army and BYU are off this week, while Notre Dame gets two points for the road game, bringing the independents' average up to 13. Again, their score doesn't get factored in here because they don't belong to a conference, so their NCSS scores are taken with a handful of salt when it comes time to look into the Death to the BCS Playoffs.

As expected overall though, the shifts here were minimal. We're still a few weeks away from the SEC being a bunch of cowards before getting a ton of points back in their final games (a phenomenon that still makes no sense to me), and the final standings will look different, but overall it continues to interest me that the "weaker" conferences according to the elitists have the best non-conference schedules.

We'll look more into this next week. I'll be back on Monday though with Playoff Points updates from the weekend, and with luck, a mock playoff bracket.