There has been alot of controversy over #1 in the CFP rankings. Ohio State's case is that they have been a much more dominant team all year. LSU defenders are quick to point to a more difficult schedule and point to the fact that OSU only looks dominant because of an easier schedule.
This motivated me to look into how impressive each teams results have been relative to their schedule. As I believe that it makes sense that whatever team has had better results relative to their schedule should be #1. To do this I used the current S&P rankings to create a new metric, while there is an S&P+ resume ranking I believe it only takes W/L into account.
The statistical concept behind this model is the MLE (Maximum Likelihood Estimator). For each team, I solved for the S&P ranking that would most likely preduce the season that team has had. Factored into this is each game, the S&P Ranking of the other team, and the score margin.
The results of this allow for a data driven comparison of how dominant a team has been with strength of schedule factored in. A teams "Score" represents the most likely S&P+ ranking we would expect for that team, based on their on field results.
A few notes on the rankings:
- FCS games were excluded when making the estimate
- I only looked at the CFP top 15 teams due to the amount of time required
- Individual games are given a score of Dominant, Great, Good, Ok, Poor
- Dominant means the teams most likely S&P score base on the individual game result is >= 40
- Great is between 40 and 30
- Good is between 30 and 20
- Ok is between 20 and 10
- Poor is less than 10
| Team | Rank | Score | Dominant | Great | Good | Ok | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio St. | 1 | 42.6 | 7 | 1 | 3 | ||
| Clemson | 2 | 34.7 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | |
| Alabama | 3 | 31.9 | 5 | 5 | |||
| LSU | 4 | 29.1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 1 | |
| Georgia | 5 | 27.1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Florida | 6 | 25.9 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3 | |
| Utah | 7 | 25.8 | 2 | 1 | 5 | 2 | |
| Wisconsin | 8 | 25.7 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Penn St. | 9 | 25.5 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| Oregon | 10 | 24.1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 2 |
| Michigan | 11 | 23.8 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Auburn | 12 | 23.7 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 1 | |
| Oklahoma | 13 | 20.1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 1 |
| Minnesota | 14 | 16.8 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 3 | |
| Baylor | 15 | 14.3 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
Analysis of the above shows OSU's results given their schedule are much more impressive than the LSU results given their schedule. The difference between OSU and LSU is larger than the difference between LSU and Minnesota.
This measures dominance over the season. Some teams like Minnesota and TTUN had poor starts to the season and have been much more dominant relative to their schedule lately.
If you exclude Minnesota's first 4 games their score comes out to 23.2
If you only look at TTUN post Penn St their score is 39.0
