2016 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 8

With a quick look at the overall schedule, we are into the second half of the college football season. Most of the haves and have-nots have been established, as I have two mock Death to the BCS Playoff brackets for the season in the books. With seven more weeks' worth of games to play though, there's a lot of data left to collect.

This also means we're approaching Coward Week in about a month, which I think is what I'm going to call it formally in the future because it's not just Nick Saban who's a coward.

We saw a little movement in last week's rankings, though the MAC has been at or near the top pretty much all season to date. With conference play in full swing though, most of the rankings changes are minimal. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how this metric works, check back to the season introduction post.

1. Conference USA (0.31, 5.38; LW: 2). North Texas visits Army, Rice hosts FCS Prairie View, and Middle Tennessee visits Missouri.
2. Sun Belt (0.09, 5.09; LW: 3). Georgia State hosts FCS Tennessee-Martin, and Louisiana Monroe visits New Mexico.
3. Mountain West (0.17, 5.08; LW: 4). Boise State hosts BYU and New Mexico hosts Louisiana Monroe.
4. MAC (0.00, 5.08; LW: 1). No change.
5. American Athletic (0.00, 4.42; LW: 5). No change.
6. ACC (0.00, 3.29; LW: 6). No change.
7. Pac 12 (0.00, 3.17; LW: 7). No change.
8. Big Ten (0.00, 3.14; LW: 8). No change.
9. SEC (0.07, 3.00; LW: 9). South Carolina hosts Massachusetts, Missouri hosts Middle Tennessee, and Vanderbilt hosts FCS Tennessee State.
10. Big 12 (0.00, 2.90; LW: 10). No change.

To see the updated spreadsheet, click here.

Photographer uncredited (Photo from Saturday Down South)

The MAC finally falls from its perch, though they've had all of their games in conference for the last three weeks now. This has allowed a few of the other Group of Five conferences to catch up, though the American Athletic conference remains in fifth place. As usually happens, the Group of Five is in the top five.

This week has the most FCS teams in a while, but fortunately I haven't had to disqualify anyone other than Kent State a few weeks back for playing multiple games against that level of competition. There are quite a few byes this week, all marked in purple on the above spreadsheet.

The biggest games of the week are of course in-conference, which this metric does not measure. What does is Playoff Points, and I will return next week with a look at the fallout from the weekend and an updated look at the Death to the BCS Playoffs picture.