2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 5

I'm working on trying to get some charts going for my college football rankings this year. There's just not much to show yet; I figured out how to get the First Degree Playoff Points to work fairly easily, but Second Degree Points and Adjusted Playoff Points are a little trickier.

I could conceivably do a similar thing for the NCSS rankings too, but the negative scores would make things tricky. I'll keep thinking about it, but in the meantime, I need to continue analyzing the schedule.

If you need a refresher on how the NCSS rankings work, you can refer back to my season introduction post. Let's get an update. Below are the updated rankings for each conference. Since we're getting into the meat of the conference schedules, I will just mention the games that impact the NCSS scores one way or the other.

1. MAC (0.42, 5.08; LW: 2). Toledo visits BYU and Buffalo visits Boston College.
2. Mountain West (0.25, 4.92; LW: 1). Air Force hosts Navy and San Diego State visits South Alabama.
3. Sun Belt (0.27, 4.73; LW: 4). Louisiana Monroe visits Auburn, Texas State hosts FCS Incarnate Word, and South Alabama hosts San Diego State.
4. Conference USA (0.15, 4.62; LW: 3). Marshall visits Pittsburgh and Western Kentucky hosts FCS Houston Baptist.
5. American Athletic (0.58, 4.42; LW: 5). Memphis visits Ole Miss, Navy visits Air Force, and Tulane visits Massachusetts.
6. Big Ten (0.00, 3.07; LW: 6). No change.
7. ACC (0.21, 3.07; LW: 9). Syracuse hosts Notre Dame, Boston College, hosts Buffalo, and Pittsburgh hosts Marshall.
8. Pac 12 (0.00, 3.00; LW: 7). No change.
9. Big 12 (0.00, 2.90; LW: 8). No change.
10. SEC (0.07, 2.71; LW: 10). Arkansas hosts FCS Alcorn State, Auburn hosts Louisiana Monroe and Ole Miss hosts Memphis.

Photo by Timothy D. Easley (AP)

To see the updated spreadsheet, click here.

Most of the remaining non-conference games will end up involving the independent teams, who if they were their own conference would have an average score of 9.25. There will also be some FCS games left on the schedule as well as the final week of the regular season holding some strong non-conference games.

I will be back next week with a look at the Week 5 results as well as the schedule for Week 6.