Re: Florida with 2 losses only drops one after a loss to a crap

That's such a weird way to look at rankings. There's no formula for how many spots a team should fall after a loss or rise after a win, and a whole bunch of factors go into something like that.

1) They beat the team behind them so for Florida to fall further, UGA would also likely have to drop after hammering Missouri which would be strange.

2) Cincy hasn't played a game in a month due to Covid which is clearly impacting their ability to establish themselves as legit contenders.

3) Why does it even matter? None of them are in the playoff race anyway.

On a related train of thought, if Florida loses a close game to Bama next weekend, why should they drop? I'm sure y'all will be up in arms about 3 loss Florida in the top 10 at that point, but why should a team losing to Bama lower your opinion of them? Do you think anyone else ranked in the 6-15 range would beat Bama? I dont. So the only difference between Florida this week and Florida next week will be that they had to play Bama while everyone else did not.

TigersAndCubs

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That's not what I'm saying. At least, not in this framework.

Dec 16, 2020, 8:44 AM

A 1-9 team could absolutely be the 10th best team in the country if you just had the 11 best teams all playing each other in a round robin. It's not a likely outcome, but it is possible.However, that's not my argument. The playoff rankings obviously have to consider resume along with the power ranking aspect which is where they differ from some of the statistical metrics like FPI and SP+ that are purely power rankings and do not account for resume.

What makes this different is that Florida will have 3 losses, not 9 losses, which still allows you to compare them with other teams that have a comparable number or losses. It's trickier with the undefeated G5 teams because they generally just don't have games against teams like Bama, Clemson, ND, A&M, Georgia, etc on their resume to judge them by. Is beating BYU by 5 better than losing to Alabama by 28? I don't know the answer to that. I would say it probably is since the A&M/Bama score was that lopsided, but, at some point, losing to Bama by a smaller margin (maybe 14ish) becomes more impressive than beating BYU by 5 because of how much better Bama is than BYU. It's just a very difficult task to balance all of that and give things the proper weight.

But what we can at least do is still compare Florida to Georgia, Iowa State, Oklahoma State, etc. And when comparing them to that group, particularly the teams that aren't playing in a CCG at all, we shouldn't really judge Florida too harshly for losing to the best team in the country when those other teams are playing easier games or not playing at all. If Iowa State beats Oklahoma by 3 and Florida loses to Bama by 3, I'm probably going to be more impressed by what Florida did, even though I also understand that Iowa State deserves to be rewarded for a nice win and taking home the Big XII title. What I would not agree with is moving Georgia ahead of Florida simply because Florida lost while Georgia sat at home watching.

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