{"id":3064,"date":"2016-11-01T10:38:07","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T15:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/?p=3064"},"modified":"2016-11-01T11:30:10","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T16:30:10","slug":"jessup-pope-jp-college-football-rankings-week-beginning-30-october-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/2016\/11\/01\/jessup-pope-jp-college-football-rankings-week-beginning-30-october-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Jessup Pope (JP) College Football Rankings: Week Beginning 30 October 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by guest blogger, Dr. Ryan Jessup<\/p>\n<p>I present to you the first edition of the second season of the new and improved Jessup Pope (JP) College Football Rankings in which we rank all 128 college football teams in the bowl subdivision based on their performances through the first 9 weeks of the current season.<\/p>\n<p><em>A very brief history<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Last season, Don Pope and I introduced our ranking system which uses a modified version of the Google PageRank algorithm \u2013 the algorithm that jump-started the search engine giant and still underlies their current approach today \u2013 to allow it to rank <em>teams<\/em> instead of <em>webpages<\/em>.\u00a0 We also enabled it to account for home field advantage and temporal decay of performances (this is where games early in the season weigh less in the rankings than more recent games), among other things.<\/p>\n<p><em>New and improved<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You might recall that <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/2016\/01\/12\/jessup-pope-jp-college-football-rankings-final-analysis\/\">last season<\/a> we ended with the same final 4 as the college football playoff (CFP) rankings and predicted that Alabama would defeat Clemson in the Championship by 5.7 points, a game Alabama won by 5 points.\u00a0 Our model (a) beat Las Vegas and (b) correctly predicted the winner of the bowl games 51.2% of the time.\u00a0 For us, that is not good enough.\u00a0 So, in the offseason we grabbed more seasons of college football data to help our system better learn and made a few additional modifications to supercharge the system.\u00a0 When we finally got around to running our new version on last season\u2019s data, we found that it beat Vegas 61% of the time and correctly predicted the bowl game winner 56% of the time.<\/p>\n<p><em>About our rankings<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Before we get into the rankings here are a few quick reminders:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We do not care about predicting the CFP rankings. We care about good predictions of game outcomes and correctly predicting the CFP rankings may lead us in the wrong direction.<\/li>\n<li>Our model does not care about win-loss records. A team with a losing record who lost multiple away games against tough teams by narrow margins will likely end up higher in our rankings than an undefeated team that has played a creampuff schedule.<\/li>\n<li>Our model is not biased by name recognition, what conference a team plays in, or start of the season rankings \u2013 three potential weaknesses of human ranking systems.<\/li>\n<li>Our model is forward-looking so as to predict future outcomes whereas traditional polls and ranking systems are backwards-looking and hence merely describe prior performance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>The rankings<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As with last season, we are presenting the rankings using a dotplot which preserves the relative difference in JP values.\u00a0 For example, this image demonstrates that the difference in quality between teams 1 and 2 is larger than the difference between teams 15 and 50!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-3066 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9-442x490.jpg\" alt=\"JP Football rankings week 9\" width=\"442\" height=\"490\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9-442x490.jpg 442w, https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9-135x150.jpg 135w, https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9-271x300.jpg 271w, https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9-768x851.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/files\/2016\/11\/JP-Football-rankings-week-9.jpg 861w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 442px) 100vw, 442px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>No one should be surprised that Alabama and Michigan are ranked at the top.\u00a0 Our high ranking of Wisconsin is consistent with their strong performances against quality teams, despite their two losses, both against teams that we rank higher (Michigan followed by Ohio State at #3).<\/p>\n<p>My guess is that undefeated Clemson and Washington will round out the CFP\u2019s top 4 in the first ranking of the season which will be released on Tuesday; though, our model suggests that they are currently on the outside looking in.\u00a0 Baylor and West Virginia\u2019s losses this past weekend simplified the problem that would have otherwise arisen \u2013 people wondering why those two undefeated teams were ranked so low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by guest blogger, Dr. Ryan Jessup I present to you the first edition of the second season of the new and improved Jessup Pope (JP) College Football Rankings in which we rank all 128 college football teams in the bowl subdivision based on their performances through the first 9 weeks of the current season. A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5020,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[818,6633,2750,467,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academics","category-coba-faculty","category-current-students","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5020"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3064"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3068,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions\/3068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/coba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}