Week 5 FEI Ratings

by Brian Fremeau

In the ACC chapter of Football Outsiders Almanac 2009, I openly wondered if Miami head coach Randy Shannon could weather the storm through the early part of Hurricanes' schedule. FEI projections were kind to Miami (No. 18 nationally) but were even higher on the prospects for Florida State, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and Oklahoma, the gauntlet of opponents the Hurricanes would face over the first month of the season. If they were to lose all four, could they gather themselves and rip off eight straight against weaker competition to finish with a respectable record?

Shannon doesn't have to worry about the team's spirits. Miami recovered from an early deficit against Oklahoma Saturday night and finished off the Sooners with a back-breaking clock-killing possession over the final four minutes of the game. Now at 3-1, the Hurricanes are No. 11 in the major polls and the most battle-tested team in the land.

Our unique strength of schedule (SOS) metric calculates the likelihood that an elite team would go undefeated against each given team's schedule. The Hurricanes rank third nationally in that category with a 0.146 SOS rating -- a 14.6 percent likelihood that an elite (top 5) team would run the table over Miami's entire schedule. The heavy lifting is now in Miami's rear-view mirror. Miami has played the most difficult schedule by far (0.339), twice as challenging as the average schedule played to date by other BCS conference teams (0.679).

A year ago, five teams faced a four-game stretch more difficult than Miami's this season and survived with only one loss (Table 1).

Team	4-Game SOS	Opponents over 4-Game Stretch	4-Game Record	FBS Record
Texas Tech	.231	at Kansas (W), vs. Texas (W), vs. Oklahoma State (W), at Oklahoma (L)	3-1	9-2
Texas	.255	vs. Oklahoma (W), vs. Missouri (W), vs. Oklahoma State (W), at Texas Tech (L)	3-1	12-1
Georgia	.273	vs. Tennessee (W), vs. Vanderbilt (W), at LSU (W), vs. Florida (L)	3-1	9-3
Alabama	.301	at LSU (W), vs. Mississippi State (W), vs. Auburn (W), vs. Florida (L)	3-1	12-2
LSU	.313	at Auburn (W), vs. Mississippi State (W), at Florida (L), at South Carolina (W)	3-1	7-5

Georgia, Alabama, and LSU all appear on the list primarily due to the stratospheric rating of Florida last season -- the other three games weren't exceedingly difficult challenges, but Florida's rating affects the entire sequence. Texas and Texas Tech both had stacked mid-to-late-season schedules, and each was bumped from national championship consideration due to a loss at the end of the four-game series.

Miami's situation is unique in two key respects. By knocking out its toughest challenges early, Miami should be positioned to move up the national polls every week as others fall away. Morale isn't a problem, but the Hurricanes may need to battle malaise and focus issues throughout the rest of the season. Will the swagger carry the day when the whole world isn't watching? This weekend presents a classic letdown situation, but the opponent is lowly FCS (formerly Division 1-AA) squad Florida A&M.

Second, each of the difficult stretches in Table 1 were played exclusively against conference competition. Miami has already played what appear to be three of the most challenging ACC teams it will face, but the Hurricanes' victory over Oklahoma may have the most lasting effect for its BCS national championship aspirations. If a healthy Sam Bradford can put the Sooners back on track for a BCS bowl berth of its own, the computer systems (including FEI) will love the Hurricanes even more.

Week 5 FEI Top 25

The principles of the Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) 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 (GE), 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 (SOS) is calculated as the likelihood that an elite team would win every game on the given team's schedule.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. Since limited data is available at the beginning of the season, the ratings to date are a function of both actual games played and projected outcomes based on the 2009 Projected FEI Ratings [3]. The weight given to projected outcomes will be reduced each week until mid-October, at which point the projections will be eliminated entirely.

ALSO: FEI ratings for all 120 FBS teams are now listed in the stats page section of FootballOutsiders.com. Click here for current ratings [4], or here for 2008 ratings [5]. Other past seasons will be added soon.

Rank	Team	FBS W-L	FEI	Last Week	GE	GE Rank	SOS	SOS Rank	OE	OE Rank	DE	DE Rank	FPA	FPA Rank
1	Florida	3-0	0.212	1	0.402	3	0.362	71	0.441	15	-0.680	4	0.571	11
2	Texas	4-0	0.202	4	0.386	4	0.345	65	0.297	28	-0.696	2	0.573	9
3	Virginia Tech	4-1	0.198	2	0.177	21	0.216	14	0.446	14	-0.321	27	0.517	42
4	Miami	3-1	0.198	9	0.003	56	0.146	3	0.159	39	0.102	68	0.511	49
5	TCU	3-0	0.197	10	0.233	12	0.395	81	-0.002	56	-0.660	7	0.544	21
6	Alabama	5-0	0.197	7	0.380	5	0.243	27	0.603	8	-0.695	3	0.536	25
7	Auburn	5-0	0.192	5	0.235	10	0.330	60	0.604	7	-0.253	32	0.510	50
8	Iowa	4-0	0.182	3	0.220	16	0.257	38	0.017	54	-0.670	6	0.551	18
9	Boise State	4-0	0.182	8	0.402	2	0.625	115	0.466	13	-0.624	8	0.574	8
10	Oklahoma	1-2	0.181	12	0.198	19	0.128	2	0.303	27	-0.420	19	0.518	40
11	Ohio State	4-1	0.179	13	0.233	11	0.335	63	0.153	40	-0.511	14	0.559	15
12	USC	4-1	0.167	17	0.237	9	0.229	23	0.094	45	-0.757	1	0.524	34
Rank	Team	FBS W-L	FEI	Last Week	GE	GE Rank	SOS	SOS Rank	OE	OE Rank	DE	DE Rank	FPA	FPA Rank
13	South Florida	3-0	0.162	14	0.223	15	0.253	36	0.343	23	-0.566	10	0.500	60
14	West Virginia	2-1	0.159	6	0.081	37	0.243	28	0.353	21	-0.161	42	0.449	101
15	Cincinnati	4-0	0.156	26	0.342	7	0.309	52	1.326	1	-0.270	31	0.485	83
16	Kansas	3-0	0.152	23	0.343	6	0.304	49	0.490	12	-0.513	13	0.590	6
17	Florida State	1-3	0.150	11	0.038	48	0.115	1	0.115	43	0.545	113	0.597	2
18	Arizona	2-1	0.139	27	-0.007	60	0.221	18	-0.189	79	-0.014	59	0.524	32
19	Pittsburgh	3-1	0.137	32	0.152	25	0.317	54	0.290	29	0.283	96	0.593	4
20	LSU	5-0	0.134	36	0.209	18	0.222	19	0.078	51	-0.466	17	0.543	22
21	Oregon	4-1	0.133	16	0.223	14	0.240	26	0.196	37	-0.535	11	0.530	28
22	Clemson	2-3	0.128	15	0.066	41	0.173	6	-0.461	109	-0.449	18	0.557	16
23	Boston College	3-1	0.124	35	0.101	32	0.218	16	0.144	41	-0.502	16	0.484	84
24	Nebraska	3-1	0.122	42	0.430	1	0.270	43	0.711	4	-0.601	9	0.596	3
25	Utah	3-1	0.120	25	0.117	29	0.321	58	-0.024	58	-0.393	21	0.520	38