2017 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 8

We're halfway through the college football regular season now, with just seven weeks left to play. Only six of these weeks will actually involve full slates of games, with Week 14 being Championship Week. I'll get to that when the time comes though.

For now, we're focused on the upcoming schedule for Week 8. With conference play in full swing, there are very few non-conference games on the schedule, but they happen. With four independent teams, there's always going to be at least a few games that fit this banner. And that's before we get to Nick Saban Is A Coward Week, which is coming up in about a month.

If you need a refresher on how this metric works, you can read that in my season introductory post. Let's look at the schedule!

2017 NCAA Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 7 Mock Bracket

Last week I had just enough room in my first mock bracket of the season to squeeze in every eligible unbeaten team. And then, go figure, a bunch of them fell like flies.

This complicates the Death to the BCS Playoff picture, even though we still have a good month and a half of season left to play. Teams will separate from the pack a little bit more, and hopefully things will become easier, but in the meantime, I need the practice for bracket building.

So here's a refresher on how this works. The ten conference champions, along with six at large selections, will be seeded 1-16, with higher seeds getting home field advantage for three rounds. To pick out the at large teams and seed the field, I use several of my own metrics, focusing a little on Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS) and more so on First Degree, Second Degree, and Adjusted Playoff Points (PP1, PP2, and aPP, respectively) to help. Then, to help reduce bias, I use computer rankings that factor in margin of victory created by Jeff Sagarin (SAG), the late David Rothman (ROTH), and the website All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS). These factors all get kind of organically combined to build the field. The Rothman rankings are up this week, so unlike last week, all three computer rankings will be under consideration.

So without further ado, let's make a mock bracket.

2017 NCAA Playoff Points: Week 7

I was waiting for the chaotic week. And go figure: the first week after I start doing mock brackets, all hell breaks loose.

I'll delve into how this affects the Death to the BCS Playoffs later today; I need time to look over the numbers. But we have to get the numbers first, and that's where this comes in.

You can view last week's rankings here. If you need a refresher on how each of the various Playoffs Points scores are calculated, you can view that here.

2017 COAS Pigskin Pick 'Em Week 6

The coalition returns for more NFL picks, and now that we're a little ways into the season, I'm starting to get into the swing of things.

Through the first four weeks, I had made one hero pick and lost it. Last week I made up for it, going hero five times and winning three of them. It propelled me to winning my first week against Adam, taking four of our six disputed games, but Adam still holds a fairly solid lead at this point. However, he's out of first place as Geoffrey Clark took over the top spot with a couple more successful hero picks. He's 9-1 on those picks, and it's why he holds a narrow lead. You can view a full breakdown of our picks in relation to each other here, and our ESPN standings here, though bear in mind that Adam has two more points than ESPN says he does.

We move onto another 14 game week with the set of byes in place. Groupthink prevailed this round, as Adam and I disagree on only three games this time.

2017 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 7

We're into the full swing of conference play, and the Sun Belt seems to be aiming to steal some of MACtion's thunder here in October. But MACtion doesn't come for another few weeks, so I guess it's all okay.

Last week saw a rare week of a conference getting a negative score with the Big Ten's lone non-conference game being an FCS game for Indiana. It's kind of late in the season for it, but it's not quite to the level of Nick Saban Is A Coward Week, which I will hype up until it comes. This week, there shouldn't be another negative week as far as I know... at least, I hope not. If you need a refresher on how this metric works, you can read that in my season introductory post.

2017 NCAA Death to the BCS Playoffs: Week 6 Mock Bracket

Over the last few years I have come to discover a pattern. By Week 6, enough teams have at least one loss on their resume, which allows me to start thinking about playoff brackets.

The current system set up by the FBS conference commissioners is a decent start. It's a definite improvement over the garbage that was the BCS. If you think the BCS wasn't all that bad, go read the book pictured to the left authored by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan, then come back and tell me with a straight face that the system was all right. If you do, I will call you a liar, because the BCS was a joke.

And that's what inspired an idea by these three men: building a more equitable playoff for college football, like what is run in the lower divisions of the NCAA. That's basically what I aim to build here.

If you missed my season introductory post where I explained their playoff system, here's the CliffNotes version: 16 teams (all ten conference champions plus six at large) seeded 1-16, with home field advantage granted to the higher seeds for the first three rounds. In their system they had a selection committee, which is a role I've taken by proxy for several years now, and tried to build a bracket based on their specifications.

To do that, I use a number of metrics. To a minor degree, Non-Conference Schedule Strength (NCSS) gets factored in, though its impact is minimal when it comes to filling and seeding the field. More important are First Degree, Second Degree, and Adjusted Playoff Points (PP1, PP2, and aPP, respectively), which dig beyond the won-loss record to get an idea of just how good a team actually is.

Now, I don't want to appear biased, so I also use computer rankings to help me determine if I'm making the right choices, but the computer rankings need to be good. I have found three that factor in margin of victory, which is kind of important when we're trying to figure out how good teams actually are. For the purposes of the Death to the BCS Playoffs, I use Jeff Sagarin's (SAG) model, the late David Rothman's (ROTH) model as compiled by a UCLA faculty member, and the rankings from All My Sports Teams Suck (AMSTS). Currently the Rothman model has no data for 2017, so I'm sticking with just the Sagarin and All My Sports Teams Suck models for now, which is enough to start.

These factors all kind of organically combine to build the field of 16, which will be built out below.

2017 NCAA Playoff Points Rankings: Week 6

Saturday saw a lot of chaos in college football, which I love. It means that the order of things gets thrown out of wack, and forces everyone to look differently at the playoff picture.

I'm not quite there yet, because after last week, there were still too many undefeated teams to build out a mock playoff bracket. That may change after today, but I need to run the numbers to be sure.

Below I will run through the average win totals for each conference, plus the independents collected as their own "conference" for the purposes of these rankings. I will also update the Playoff Point totals and give each conference average for those as well. A primer on how exactly these metrics work can be found here.