12-02-2012, 12:13 PM
To answer this question, you have to answer first the age-old question about how to rank teams in general. Do you go by record (number of wins, and quality of wins), or perception? Or a bit of one, and a bit of the other?
Ideally, you'd go only on record, but 12 games are not enough to separate 120 teams with precision. There are great disparities of schedule, that have to be made up with perception.
To measure records, the computer rankings are the best (the ones that are well designed of course. Billingsley & co please abstain), because they fully account for all the games that all 120 teams play. But sometimes they unfairly penalize teams that could have beaten a harder schedule, but are stuck with weak teams for any reason (think of Stanford in 2010. We played terrible San Jose St and Wake Forest teams, and an average ND. Plus, the Pac-12 was down, so we ended having really poor computer rankings. However, if you watched the games, you could tell we were top 5 in the country).
Thus, the computers say that we have a better record and beaten better opponents than Georgia and LSU. With Georgia the computers are tight, and perception probably puts them ahead.
With LSU is trickier, as we have beaten better teams than they have. However, when you compare our 2 losses to LSU's, they have clearly the advantage. More critically, when you compare results against common opponents (Washington. We lost against them, and LSU blew them out), then it's understandable why people rank them ahead of us (I think we could beat them, though).
So using this magical mixture of record and perception, I'd rank the top 10 as
1. ND
2. Alabama
3. Oregon
4. Florida
5. Kansas St
6. Georgia
7. LSU
8. Stanford
9. Texas A&M
10. Ohio St
Sorry.
Ideally, you'd go only on record, but 12 games are not enough to separate 120 teams with precision. There are great disparities of schedule, that have to be made up with perception.
To measure records, the computer rankings are the best (the ones that are well designed of course. Billingsley & co please abstain), because they fully account for all the games that all 120 teams play. But sometimes they unfairly penalize teams that could have beaten a harder schedule, but are stuck with weak teams for any reason (think of Stanford in 2010. We played terrible San Jose St and Wake Forest teams, and an average ND. Plus, the Pac-12 was down, so we ended having really poor computer rankings. However, if you watched the games, you could tell we were top 5 in the country).
Thus, the computers say that we have a better record and beaten better opponents than Georgia and LSU. With Georgia the computers are tight, and perception probably puts them ahead.
With LSU is trickier, as we have beaten better teams than they have. However, when you compare our 2 losses to LSU's, they have clearly the advantage. More critically, when you compare results against common opponents (Washington. We lost against them, and LSU blew them out), then it's understandable why people rank them ahead of us (I think we could beat them, though).
So using this magical mixture of record and perception, I'd rank the top 10 as
1. ND
2. Alabama
3. Oregon
4. Florida
5. Kansas St
6. Georgia
7. LSU
8. Stanford
9. Texas A&M
10. Ohio St
Sorry.