SMQ: College Football Playoff hopefuls and strength of schedule

Top teams were upset in Week 13. Can they still get back in the College Football Playoff picture? SMQ evaluates each contender’s strength of schedule.

We will hear in the coming days why one team is more worthy of a spot in the College Football Playoff than another. A lot of this discourse will center on strength of schedule, and the teams that each contender has played over the course of the regular season. Perception is a fickle thing, though, and often we tend to overvalue some teams’ opponents and undervalue other teams’ competition.

It is true that not all wins and losses were created equal. In the hunt for one of the four spots in the College Football Playoff, one of the primary considerations that the selection committee will take into account is the schedule each team has played.

Strength of schedule is often bandied about by fans and pundits alike as an immutable concept. But two different measures of strength of schedule can often have widely divergent opinions about the toughness of a team’s schedule. When it comes to 130 FBS teams, objectivity is hard to come by in any metric that isn’t measured in game play.

That’s why a composite seems like the best way to flatten the numbers and determine where a team stands in the hierarchy. With only two undefeated teams left, the College Football Playoff selection committee will have to parse down the numbers.

In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s look at some strength of schedule metrics. We are not creating new algorithms, but rather looking at compiling and flattening where each team stood entering Week 13.

What is the pitfall of such a composite?

These numbers, as is the case with all numbers, are not perfect. As of this writing, we do not yet have the most current numbers from various computer polls. Those will come out over the course of Sunday. Alabama will have a slightly stronger schedule after playing one another. Wisconsin and Miami will have a slightly weaker strength of schedule after playing sub-.500 teams.

But in general, what we are looking for today is how closely various computerized strength of schedule ratings are positioning each of the remaining contenders. Thus, this variance is likely going to change less than any individual number.

What exactly is being done to get a composite strength of schedule rank?

This week’s SMQ has taken two steps. First, we’ve compiled the strength of schedule ratings from five different computer systems. These are from Sports Reference, the Massey Ratings, the Colley Matrix, the Billingsley Report, and Anderson Sports. These five were chosen as the most accessible numbers to extract in an efficient fashion. They closely correlate to other strength of schedule rankings such as the SOS numbers in the Sagarin rankings.

With these five sets of rankings, two steps were taken to determine a composite rank. First, the composite sum is taken of each team’s set of strength of schedule numbers. Then those numbers were ran through a variance calculation that determines how closely or widely divergent the computers view each team’s schedule. Then the composite sum is multiplied by the variance, and those teams with the lowest number are the ones with the strongest schedules according to the numbers.

This allows us to get a much clearer (if still imperfect) view of how strong each team’s competition has been over the course of the season. A few of the teams still in the hunt for one of the four coveted berths in the semifinals have played some of the toughest schedules in the country. Others have played opponents that skew closer to the median value for schedules among FBS teams.

Though UCF is one of the two remaining undefeated teams, their schedule breaks down below the median. In the composite, they came out with the 81st-ranked schedule in terms of quality, and the variance between how computers view that schedule is lower than every other contender. So we will focus on the final nine, separated into four groups by schedule quality, as we dive into this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback.