by Brian Fremeau

The third weekend of the college football season showcased a few more surprises, highlighted by Stanford's victory over USC and impressive road victories from Florida and Notre Dame. The Gators, Irish, and Cardinal are all in this week's FEI top 10, and though there will certainly be other tough tests in the coming weeks and months, each is well positioned to be part of the national championship discussion throughout the course of the season.

They are all well-positioned in part because none of them have to face Alabama in the regular season. The Crimson Tide obliterated Arkansas 52-0 on Saturday, a lopsided result at least partially attributable to the fragile emotional state of affairs in Fayetteville. But it's also an indicator of how much better Alabama may be than the rest of the nation. The Crimson Tide had the highest FEI projection at the start of the season, and through three games, no team has exceeded its projection in terms of raw game efficiency more than Alabama has.

In the weekly FEI tables published here, I include a couple of columns regarding mean wins. One column represents the average total wins against FBS opponents a team should expect against its entire schedule, and the other represents the average total against its remaining games. Adding the remaining mean wins projection to actual wins already recorded gives us the actual updated projection for the end of the regular season.

Alabama's FBS mean wins projection is now 10.1, up from 9.3 at the start of the year. The Crimson Tide are the only team that had been projected to win more than nine FBS games at the start of the year which also saw their mean wins projection rise over the first three weeks. Boise State has held steady at 9.9 wins. The rest have drifted down, including USC (10.1 preseason, down to 8.5 this week).

The following table represents the five teams that have improved their season win projection most dramatically in the first three weeks of the year, and the five teams that are now projected to fall well short of their preseason outlook according to FEI.

Not every team has experienced a significant change in its mean wins projection through the first part of the season, but there has been plenty of shifting. Half of all teams have had a projection shift of less than one game, but the average shift to date in mean wins for all teams is 1.2 games. The chart below illustrates the mean wins adjustment for each team from our preseason FEI projections to date.

Week 3 Revisionist Box Scores

This weekly feature identifies the games played each week that were most impacted by turnovers, special teams, field position, or some combination of the three. The neutralized margin of victory is a function of the point values earned and surrendered based on field position and expected scoring rates.

2012 totals to date:

• Net Total Turnover Value was the difference in 22 of 133 FBS games (16.5 percent)
• Net Special Teams Value was the difference in 12 of 133 FBS games (9.0 percent)
• Net Field Position Value was the difference in 17 of 133 FBS games (12.8 percent)
• Turnovers, Special Teams and/or Field Position was the difference in 31 of 133 FBS games (23.3 percent)

2012 Game Splits for all teams, including the offensive, defensive, special teams, field position, and turnover values recorded in each FBS game are provided here.

FEI Week 3 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 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.

Offensive Efficiency (OE) is the raw unadjusted efficiency of the given team's offense, a measure of its actual drive success against expected drive success based on field position. Defensive Efficiency (DE) is the raw unadjusted efficiency of the given team's defense, a measure of the actual drive success of its opponents against expected drive success based on field position. Field Position Advantage (FPA) is 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. 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. Opponent-adjusted offensive and defensive FEI ratings will also debut in Week 7.

These FEI ratings are a function of results of games played through September 15. The ratings for all FBS teams can be found here.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 19 Sep 2012

1 comment, Last at 08 Dec 2012, 3:20am by john123456