by Brian Fremeau

It’s only been two weeks. Georgia fans are ready to dump Mark Richt and Notre Dame fans are apoplectic over red zone turnovers, but it’s appropriate to remember that it has only been two weeks. That goes double for teams off to a hot start against predominantly weak opposition. For some programs, we won’t have a solid handle on their true strengths and weaknesses before midseason.

Can we draw long-term conclusions from the results of the last couple of weekends? Not definitively, but that won’t reassure the fan bases in Athens or South Bend. There are recent examples of 0-2 teams turning things around in a big way. Virginia Tech last season steamrolled to a BCS bowl game after facing the bleakest of beginnings. Of course, there are many other examples of teams stumbling out of the gate and never quite finding their footing. No one is predicting Georgia or Notre Dame to have a disastrous 2011, but both teams are almost certain to fall short of their preseason BCS goals.

It hurts to have to face that reality so early in the season. But at least those teams challenged themselves with early-season tests. Only five games have been played so far this year between teams currently ranked in the FEI top 25, and four of them involved either Georgia (vs. Boise State, vs. South Carolina) or Notre Dame (vs. South Florida, vs. Michigan). (The other? LSU vs. Oregon in JerryWorld.)

There is no guarantee that those teams will remain in the top 25, so this is possibly a mere fleeting observation, but the void of top interconference scheduling and the competitive nature of the few games that have been played means that the FEI ratings will continue to remain fairly stable.

Many other teams ranked in the top 25 have dominated bad opponents as expected. In the new Unit Value Splits analysis I am providing this year, the high scores rolled up by many teams at the top of the FEI ratings have been mostly produced by exceptional offensive efficiency and often coupled with either dominant defense or special teams play. But there have been examples of teams winning all three phases of the game.

This is a somewhat arbitrary line to draw, but I pulled out only the games thus far in 2011 in which the winning team contributed at least seven points of scoring margin value via its offense, defense and special teams play in the game. In 2010, only 17 victories out of the 718 FBS games played (2.4 percent) would qualify and only two teams were able to pull off the feat twice (Oregon vs. New Mexico and Washington; Utah vs. New Mexico and San Jose State). This year, the Florida Gators are already two for two, earning at least a touchdown advantage in all three phases of the game in victories over both Florida Atlantic and UAB.

It will be a few weeks before we debut opponent-adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency ratings, so the significance of this kind of distinction isn’t particularly high. Almost all of the teams last year that were beat by more than a touchdown in all three phases of the game were mediocre or weak. The best team to suffer a seven point deficit in all three phases of a game in 2010 was No. 37 Arizona State, losing 50-10 to California in October.

FEI Week 2 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 listed here includes 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 RMW) represent the average expected team wins for games scheduled but not yet played.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. Since limited data is available in the early part of the season, preseason projections are factored into the current ratings. The weight given to projected data will be reduced each week until Week 7, when it will be eliminated entirely. Offensive and defensive FEI ratings will also debut in Week 7.

These FEI ratings are a function of results of games played through September 10. The ratings for all FBS teams can be found here.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 14 Sep 2011

7 comments, Last at 15 Sep 2011, 5:31pm by Brian Fremeau