by Brian Fremeau

A mostly uneventful weekend translates to a mostly uneventful FEI top-25 update. Every team in last week's top 15 was victorious or idle, and most of the games that were played weren't very competitive. The teams at the very top -- Alabama, Florida, Texas, and TCU -- won by a combined margin of 203-33. Yawn.

According to FEI, none of the undefeated contenders has played a particularly challenging schedule this season. Alabama has played No. 7 Virginia Tech, No. 23 LSU, and No. 24 Mississippi, but each of the other unblemished teams has knocked off only one FEI top-25 opponent each. The home stretch will feature a few more marquee matchups, including the upcoming Alabama-Florida SEC championship game pitting No. 1 against No. 2 a week from Saturday. Good news, because the 2009 season and college football fans deserve at least one Game of the Year.

Week 12 FEI Top 25

The principles of the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) can be found here. Like DVOA, FEI rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. Unlike DVOA, it is drive-based, not play-by-play based, and it is specifically engineered to measure the college game.

FEI is the opponent-adjusted value of Game Efficiency (GE), a measurement of the success rate of a team scoring and preventing opponent scoring throughout the non-garbage-time possessions of a game. Like DVOA, it represents a team's efficiency value over average. Strength of Schedule (SOS) is calculated as the likelihood that an elite team would win every game on the given team's schedule to date. SOS listed here does not include future games scheduled.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. Preseason projections are not a factor in the current calculations. Current FEI ratings are a function of results of games played through Nov. 21st.

FEI ratings for all 120 FBS teams are now listed in the stats page section of FootballOutsiders.com. Click here for current ratings; the pull-down menu in the stats section directs you to 2007 and 2008 ratings.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 25 Nov 2009

1 comment, Last at 25 Nov 2009, 6:42pm by Will