by Brian Fremeau

College football's postseason is really screwy. Teams play completely unbalanced schedules, often with very few common opponents, and then two teams are selected at the end to participate in a championship game. There is rarely a high degree of certainty that the two best teams are selected, and the case for other candidates is often very strong.

I'm talking about the conference championship games, not the BCS. In the Pac-12, a terrible UCLA team has earned a spot to play for the championship due to sanctions against USC, but even if the Trojans were in, Stanford seems to be the better team. In the SEC, LSU and Alabama are clearly the two best teams in the conference, but Georgia gets to play for the title precisely because it didn't have to play either one of them or Arkansas beforehand. In the ACC, Virginia Tech and Clemson share only three common opponents to date, plus a head-to-head game that doesn't mean anything come Saturday. There's a rematch in the Big Ten too.

It certainly makes sense to crown a conference division champ based on round robin play within the division. But that's not happening either. An additional three or four games of cross-division play represents a significant amount of data in the conference standings. And those games are never equally balanced.

It seems to me that the conference championship structure deserves BCS-level scrutiny as well. Why not pit the two top teams in a conference as a whole (by record if you wish, or by some more sophisticated metrics) rather than be bound by the division distinctions? Or, if the division distinctions are important, why not only include division games in the division standings? It wouldn't make much sense for the Big East or Big 12 to include non-conference games in their respective championship standings. Why does it make sense to include non-division games in conference division standings?

As we head into what some are lamenting as a conference championship week lacking in significant games, I think it's worth examining these questions. They are especially valid in the face of conference expansion that will likely strain the connectedness of conferences as a whole and create even more discrepancies in intra-conference schedule strength.

Perhaps the superconference era is on the horizon, perhaps not. But if we wish to possibly one day have a system where four 16-team conference championship games serve as some sort of national quarterfinal, don't we want to ensure that the process by which those teams are selected is sound? Don't we want to ensure that the two best teams from each conference participate? These issues crop up every year and deserve some critical thought.

Below, I present the season-to-date resumes for each of the participants in the four AQ conference championship games, plus the de facto championship game in the Big 12. For each game that involved a common opponent, I highlight in yellow the team that had the better performance in each category: Offensive Efficiency (OE), Field Position Advantage (FPA), Offensive FEI (OFEI), Defensive FEI (DFEI), and overall opponent-adjusted game efficiency (GFEI). For head-to-head matchups, the team that performed better in each category is highlighted in blue.

SEC Championship Game

Georgia is riding a nine-game winning streak and played its best game of the year in a demolition of Georgia Tech last weekend, but the 40th-ranked Yellow Jackets were the highest ranked FEI opponent Georgia has faced since September, so the overall resume is pretty thin. In terms of GFEI performances, Georgia posted only two top-250 games this year. LSU has six top-50 performances. The six common opponent games fall mostly in the direction of the Tigers, though Georgia's defense compares favorably in its games against Mississippi State, Florida and Auburn.

ACC Championship Game

According to FEI, Florida State is the best team in the ACC Atlantic Division, not Clemson. Even despite the Seminoles' head-to-head loss to the Tigers. The Hokies' resume trumps the Tigers' too, again despite a head-to-head loss. The ACC title matchup is interesting because the difference in the two FEI profiles has more to do with the other games than the three common opponents shared by Virginia Tech and Clemson. Clemson's end-of-year skid was sudden and ugly, especially the loss to a very mediocre North Carolina State team. Virginia Tech played its best football of the year last week against Virginia, but doesn't have a single game against a top-25 FEI opponent on the resume.

Pac-12 Championship Game

UCLA is the worst team playing in a conference title game this weekend according to FEI, and it isn't close. The sting of a 50-point loss to cross-town rival USC isn't going to wear off soon, and the entire UCLA resume fits the profile of a team that has no business dressing up as a division champ. In fact, the Bruins won 3.0 more games than the FEI Mean Wins calculation expects a team of their caliber to have won, outperforming their rating in the win column more than any other team this year. In the common opponent comparison, Oregon naturally comes out on top in almost every game, however one oddity stands out: on a per-possession basis, UCLA's offense performed better against Stanford than Oregon did versus the Cardinal.

Big Ten Championship Game

The Big Ten participants share four common opponents and a head-to-head matchup, won by the Spartans in thrilling fashion on a Hail Mary completion as time expired. What sticks out for me in this breakdown is how consistently well Wisconsin has performed all year. They lost two games in the final minute on dramatic heaves, neither one of which qualifies as a bad loss. They dominated everyone else too, while Michigan State had four games rank below Wisconsin's worst in GFEI. The Badgers have one of the highest ceilings in college football, but they tripped up in their biggest test of the year the first time around against Michigan State. They'll have a chance for revenge on Saturday night.

Big 12 Bedlam

Terrific! A de facto conference championship game between two teams that have played the same set of eight conference opponents to date. Generally speaking, the common opponent comparisons are pretty even. Both teams have posted two top-10 GFEI games to date. Oklahoma's loss to Texas Tech drags down the Sooners a bit more than Oklahoma State's loss to Iowa State. The Cowboys also get the GFEI edge against Missouri and Texas A&M despite the Sooners having the stronger Game Efficiency in those games. That's because Oklahoma had those two opponents at home and Oklahoma State had them on the road. Same story with the two bad losses. Bedlam ought to be very closely contended, but Oklahoma State's home field will be a big edge.

FEI Week 13 Top 25

The Fremeau Efficiency Index (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. "SOS Pvs" represents only games played to date. "SOS Fut" represents only remaining scheduled games.

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 RMW) represent the average expected team wins for games scheduled but not yet played.

Offensive FEI (OFEI), Defensive FEI (DFEI), Special Teams Efficiency (STE) are also provided, along with Field Position Advantage (FPA), the share of the value of total starting field position earned by each team against its opponents.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. These FEI ratings are a function of results of games played through November 26. The ratings for all FBS teams can be found here. You can also find OFEI, DFEI, and STE on their own pages.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 30 Nov 2011

11 comments, Last at 01 Dec 2011, 5:17pm by NYMike