by Brian Fremeau

The wild and crazy 2010 college football season hasn't played out quite as wild and crazy as we imagined it might a month ago. After No. 1 teams were taken down in consecutive weeks, Auburn and Oregon appear to have solidified their sports atop the BCS standings, and FEI agrees. The current FEI ratings don't look much like our preseason projections -- and there has been a bit of jostling week to week in the Top 10 -- but 10 of this week's FEI top 12 were among the same lofty group back in Week 6. Perhaps the season has finally settled down.

LSU, TCU, Stanford, and Arkansas made the biggest and most positive statements on Saturday. Their victims -- Alabama, Utah, Arizona, and South Carolina -- all tumbled to varying degrees. The Crimson Tide are the nation's top-ranked two-loss team and remain in the FEI Top 10.

With regard to the BCS, four undefeated teams remain, and FEI gives them all a better-than 50 percent chance of remaining unscathed through the regular season. TCU (96.8 percent likelihood of remaining undefeated) and Boise State (82.0 percent) are great bets to run the table and appear unstoppable along the way. Oregon (66.0 percent) and Auburn (50.2 percent) have a few more pitfalls to negotiate.

Three and Out

Week 3: Three-and-outs, Available Yards, and Explosive Drives
Week 4: Reaching the Red Zone, Methodical Drives, and Late and Close Efficiency
Week 5: Converting 10+ Yard Drives Into Scores, Points Per Possession, and Scoring After Three-and-outs
Week 6: Yards Per TD Drive, Playing With 2- or 3-Score Lead, Third Downs Per First Down Series
Week 7: FEI Team Resumes for South Carolina, Arizona State, and Utah
Week 8: FEI Team Resumes for Oregon, Wisconsin, and Georgia
Week 9: FEI Team Resumes for Iowa, Miami, and Baylor

In the tables below, the Game Efficiency, Offensive FEI, Defensive FEI, and "Game" FEI (GFEI) for each team in each game is provided. The ranking of those individual unit and game performances is also provided. Note that there have been 500 FBS vs. FBS game played to date, meaning that there have been 1,000 individual game performances for each category.

The opponent FEI ranking is also provided, as well as a general relevance factor for the particular GFEI, OFEI, and DFEI results for that team in that game. As stated in the FEI principles, my system rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. In the formula, the relevance factor is partly a function of the relative ratings of the two teams. Across all games, the least relevant results receive about one-eighth as much weight as the most relevant results. For simplicity, I've generalized the relevance data here into three equally distributed categories, High, Med, and Low.

If we had a 16-team playoff in college football, would the SEC West claim the first three at-large bids and the No. 1 overall seed? The Razorbacks join Auburn, LSU, and Alabama in this week's FEI top 11 following a dominant road victory over South Carolina. For now, that result ranks as the best single game opponent adjusted victory of the year in college football (narrowly edging out TCU's victory over Utah last weekend). They'll close out the season with tough games against Mississippi State and LSU, but dominant victories in the last few weeks have Arkansas poised to finish strong.

Before getting blown out on the road at Iowa, I was touting the Spartans as one of the most likely teams to run the table in the second half of the season. Weeks 5 through 7 (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois) will rank among the strongest three-game stretches in college football, but squeakers against unremarkable Notre Dame and Northwestern squads are relevant as well. Remaining games against Purdue and Penn State won't likely bolster MSU's FEI rating too significantly, but Sparty should be victorious in both contests.

After losing three-straight games, against Iowa State, Baylor, and Kansas State, it shouldn't be surprising to find Texas languishing among teams such as Hawaii, Troy, Army, and Tulsa in the middle of the FEI rankings. It seems impossible, however, to understand how this team managed to beat Nebraska in the middle of its skid. The defensive effort against the Cornhuskers ranks as the No. 1 opponent-adjusted defensive effort of the college football season, 160 percent better an average defense would have been expected to perform. Texas has a good defense. The offense, on the other hand, ranks ahead of only three BCS conference teams in OFEI -- Purdue, Rutgers, and Vanderbilt.

If you have a suggestion for an FEI team resume you'd like to see, drop me a line on Twitter or in the comment section here. I'm happy to answer data inquiries or provide team resume tables for bloggers interested in investigating the data themselves.

FEI Week 10 Top 25

The principles of the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) can be found here. FEI rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. FEI 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. FEI represents a team's efficiency value over average. Strength of Schedule (SOS) is calculated as the likelihood that an elite team (two standard deviations above average) would win every game on the given team's schedule to date. SOS listed here does not include future games scheduled.

Mean Wins (FBS MW) represent the average total games a team with the given FEI rating should expect to win against its complete schedule of FBS opponents. Remaining Mean Wins (FBS RW) represent the average expected team wins for games scheduled but not yet played.

Offensive FEI (OFEI) and Defensive FEI (DFEI) are the opponent-adjusted ratings of all non-garbage-time drives from scrimmage. Field Position Advantage (FPA) is the share of the value of total starting field position for the season earned by each team against its opponents. Field Goal Efficiency (FGE) is the point value per field goal attempt earned by the field goal unit.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. The FEI ratings published here are a function of the results of games played through November 6.

FEI ratings for all 120 FBS teams are 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 through 2009 ratings. There are also now separate pages for offensive and defensive FEI ratings for 2010.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 10 Nov 2010

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