Rankings through November 19th

One week later, and everything has changed. Your guess about what happens next is as good as mine (or probably better). As we just saw many ways this weekend, anything can happen.

The big surprise (at least to me) in the RWFL rankings plotted below is that Oklahoma State is still ranked in the top two throughout here.



















While the RWFL rankings have nothing to do with the official BCS Standings, we sometimes talk about using this family of rankings as a proxy for the different ways that the computer component of the BCS might turn out. In this case, however, we need to stress one important difference: the RWFL rankings as calculated here do not use the dates of the games at all, unlike some of the computer rankings in the BCS. That is, these rankings treat the games of this past weekend no differently than a game in September (e.g., when Arkansas lost to Alabama). The dates of the games could be easily incorporated to weight more recent games more heavily if one wanted to do so; but that's another coefficient that would need to be picked, counter to our keep-it-simple philosophy here. So it is an important way that we do not mimic the computer component of the BCS Standings.

Looking at the computer components of last week's BCS Standings, where Arkansas was 6th (and three teams above them lost), I fully expect to see them much higher when the Standings come out tonight, further emphasizing the importance of their upcoming game with LSU.

Our rankings (at p=0.75) for the full FBS and FCS are available on Kenneth Massey's College Football Ranking Comparison.