2017 NCAA Playoff Points Rankings: Week 5

Five weeks are in the books, and with another week completed it's time to take a look at the results.

Last week was the final week of mass non-conference games as pretty much all of the Power Five leagues have begun conference play in earnest. I'll have more about the non-conference schedules tomorrow.

Below I will rank the average scores in terms of wins and the various Playoff Points numbers for each conference through five weeks. If you need a refresher of how these metrics work, you can view that in my season introductory post.


American Athletic
Wins: 2.58 (T-6th)
PP1: 3.67 (5th)
PP2: 1.15 (6th)
aPP: 2.33 (5th)

ACC
Wins: 3.00 (3rd)
PP1: 4.79 (4th)
PP2: 1.80 (4th)
aPP: 2.07 (4th)

Big Ten
Wins: 2.93 (4th)
PP1: 5.36 (3rd)
PP2: 1.99 (2nd)
aPP: 4.21 (T-1st)

Big XII
Wins: 2.60 (5th)
PP1: 3.50 (6th)
PP2: 1.30 (5th)
aPP: 1.40 (6th)

Conference USA
Wins: 2.00 (T-10th)
PP1: 1.64 (10th)
PP2: 0.50 (9th)
aPP: -2.43 (10th)

Independents
Wins: 2.00 (T-10th)
PP1: 3.00 (7th)
PP2: 1.00 (7th)
aPP: -2.25 (8th)

MAC
Wins: 2.17 (9th)
PP1: 1.67 (9th)
PP2: 0.44 (10th)
aPP: -2.33 (9th)

Mountain West
Wins: 2.25 (8th)
PP1: 2.33 (8th)
PP2: 0.69 (8th)
aPP: -1.00 (7th)

Pac-12
Wins: 3.25 (1st)
PP1: 5.50 (2nd)
PP2: 2.27 (1st)
aPP: 4.00 (3rd)

SEC
Wins: 3.21 (2nd)
PP1: 5.57 (1st)
PP2: 1.93 (3rd)
aPP: 4.21 (T-1st)

Sun Belt
Wins: 2.58 (T-6th)
PP1: 1.17 (11th)
PP2: 0.21 (11th)
aPP: -3.33 (11th)

To see the updated spreadsheet, click here.

We saw some minor shifts in the conference rankings, but nothing crazy. The SEC finds itself back at the top in a couple categories while the Big Ten fell off a little bit. I'm still shocked that the Sun Belt is tied for sixth in average wins, but is dead last in all Playoff Point categories; the latter is normal, the former is not.

There's some sort of weird flaw with the sorting function on the Google Sheet, so I can't keep teams sorted by Playoff Points without getting a bunch of reference errors. You can still see each team's numbers though, and I went through to find the top numbers for everyone. Clemson leads all schools with 15 First Degree Playoff Points, followed by Georgia with 12, USC and Alabama are next with 11, and then Florida, Penn State, and TCU are tied for fifth with 10. Second Degree Playoff Points are a weird one with Florida State leading the way with a seven point average; given they only have one win, it makes sense. Michigan is our highest unbeaten team at four points. The Adjusted Playoff Points are all similar scores to the PP1 scores, since most of those top teams are unbeaten.

What's nice is that we are really close to being able to start doing mock Death to the BCS Playoffs brackets. There are just 17 unbeaten teams left, including the permanently banned Penn State. That leaves 16, but they represent eight different conferences. That leaves two conferences who would not get their champions into the 16 team field, so we're not quite there yet. Possibly by next week, I can start doing my first one. I'm still waiting for one of my computer rankings to start compiling though too, which may delay the bracket creation further.

That's it for today! Tomorrow I'll be back with a look at the schedule for Week 6.