FEI Week 14 Ratings

by Brian Fremeau

The Fremeau Efficiency Index principles and methodology can be found here [1]. 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, 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 is calculated from a privileged perspective (explained here [2]) and represents the likelihood that an Elite team (top 5) would post an undefeated record against the given team's opponents to date.

The following ratings are calculated based on data from all FBS games played through Saturday, November 29. Only games between FBS teams are considered.

Adjusted Offensive Efficiency and Adjusted Defensive Efficiency are the opponent-adjusted values of Offensive Efficiency and Defensive Efficiency, explained here [3]. Like FEI, the multiple-order adjustments are weighted according to both the strength of the opponent and the relative significance of the result; efficiency against a team's best competition faced is given more relevance weight. AOE and ADE represent a team's value over/under average. Positive AOE and negative ADE are the most valuable.

The Week 14 FEI Ratings for all 120 FBS teams can be found here [4]. Expanded FEI Ratings data can be found here [5].

Playoffs?!?

If ever there were a need for a college football playoff, it's this year. Not for the national championship, mind you, but for the Big 12 Conference title. Through 48 conference games, there are certainly more than two teams deserving of their shot, and a six-team, eight-team, or even a plus-one model would be better than what we've got.

If the season were shortened by eliminating those annoying non-conference games, a multiple-round playoff wouldn't even interrupt finals for the student-athletes. The first rounds could be played at home stadium sites and the finals could rotate through Kansas City, Dallas and San Antonio. Think of all of the revenue such a playoff would generate!

Here's the six-team model I propose: There would be two automatic bids per division, and two wild cards taken from either division. This year, the North would send Missouri and Nebraska and the South would send Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State to the playoff. For the following simulation, seeding was determined according to record first, followed by a double-elimination round-robin rock-paper-scissors battle to break ties. Scores were simulated by actual players from each team on an actual football field.

Wild Card Round
No. 5 Missouri def. No. 4 Nebraska (52-17) in Lincoln, Neb., October 4
No. 3 Texas Tech def. No. 6 Oklahoma State (56-20) in Lubbock, Texas, November 8

Semifinal Round
No. 2 Oklahoma def. No. 3 Texas Tech (65-21) in Norman, Okla., November 22
No. 1 Texas def. No. 5 Missouri (56-31) in Austin, Texas, October 18

Championship
No. 1 Texas def. No. 2 Oklahoma (45-35) in Dallas, Texas, October 11

Never mind the impact on the space-time continuum, I think this playoff model might really work. The first two rounds could be a bunch of blowout yawners, but the title game looks like an outstanding battle. And the best part is we get an undisputed champion of the conference!

Ahem.

There has been plenty of lamenting this week regarding the BCS-determined outcome of the Big 12 Conference South Division, and a retro-fitted hyper-playoff certainly seems as viable a solution to the problem as any. College football's annual crisis always has something to do with the BCS, and once again the best solution to the problem seems to be foresight. As obscure or unlikely as this year's nationally-implicated Big 12 tiebreaking scenario may have seemed months or years ago, it doesn't excuse the fact that the selection of a conference champion or division champion should have nothing to do with results of games outside the conference. Right? The team I follow most closely may be independent, but I'm pretty sure conferences are fundamentally built on this principle. Well, that and revenue.

That said, if the Big 12 South cannot fully sort itself out through conference records, head-to-head matchups and common opponents, what else is appropriate for breaking ties? I think a BCS-like formula that excludes out-of-conference data would be a fine way to resolve the issue, but to my knowledge, the voters and computers have not been asked to produce a conference-only perspective. So let's use FEI.

In this week's FEI ratings, Oklahoma holds a narrow lead over Texas, but that rating includes Game Efficiency data from Sooners victories over No. 19 Cincinnati and No. 27 TCU, whereas Texas' best out-of-conference victory came against No. 68 Rice. To produce the following Big 12 Conference FEI ratings, I plugged in conference games exclusively into the formula.

Texas slides ahead of Oklahoma in this conference-only output, but why? We can answer that question with Calibrated Adjusted Game Efficiency (CAGE). As first explained last season [6], FEI is calculated from multiple order Game Efficiency data modified to adjust for the strength of the opponent and relevance of the data point to an individual team. The Calibrated AGE data removes the relevance adjustment in order to directly compare individual performances of different teams.

Of the 96 Big 12 CAGE ratings (one for each team in the 48 games), 13 of the top 16 individual team performances were turned in by the big three, Texas, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. The very best single-game conference performance came in Oklahoma's rout of Texas Tech two weeks ago, far ahead of the Longhorns' best wins over Missouri and Oklahoma in back-to-back weeks in October. However, Texas' worst CAGE rating came in their last-second loss to Texas Tech (0.105), a rating better than three Oklahoma performances: versus Texas (0.087), Kansas (0.065), and Kansas State (0.016). Plus, according to variance in CAGE, Texas was the third most consistent team in the Big 12 (0.025); Oklahoma (0.060) and Texas Tech (0.119) were the least consistent.

This evaluation doesn't exactly settle the debate, but the FEI statistical evidence supports sending the Longhorns to Kansas City over Oklahoma on the merits of conference play. Texas had a stronger overall average Game Efficiency, was more consistent, and had fewer weak performances. By the same CAGE measure, Missouri is the best team from the North division by a big margin, but that's not saying much either. And the most significant part of the Big 12 Conference FEI breakdown might be the total disparity in strength of schedule.

Are Iowa State and Baylor really members of the same conference? The Bears' conference opponents went a combined 32-24 against teams other than Baylor; the Cyclones' opponents went 19-37 against conference teams other than Iowa State. The SOS rating listed above is calculated as the likelihood of an elite team going undefeated against the given team's schedule, and Baylor's conference schedule is four times harder than Iowa State's. Adding in out-of-conference games, Iowa State's overall schedule is the easiest among every BCS conference team, and is even easier than 18 team schedules from non-BCS conferences. If Cyclones fans boast about the strength of the Big 12 this offseason, ask them when they are planning on joining the league.

It's not the Cyclones' fault, of course, that they skipped playing Texas, Oklahoma and Texas Tech in 2008, but it does illustrate the danger in categorically making assumptions about teams based on other assumptions of conferences as a whole. The Pac-10 plays a round robin, but USC's conference strength of schedule is much weaker than the rest of the league, simply because the Trojans don't have to play against themselves. Ditto Florida and Alabama in what has been a mostly disappointing SEC, though they'll get their chance against one another this weekend.

Back to the matter at hand. Did the Big 12 get it right or wrong? Texas Tech played their way out both by no-showing in Norman, but also by not dominating Baylor, Nebraska, and Texas A&M. FEI says the best team overall, Oklahoma, won the bid, Texas deserved it, and it's a really close call either way. Like others, I maintain that arguments are good for college football, no solutions are perfect, and better metrics can help.