Even though they beat Washington, USC struggled, and struggled much more than
they should have against a mid-Pac-10 team. As a result, the decline in USC's
rating was much larger than Washington's increase. That gang from La-La-Land does not look invincible.
Washington State, Washington, UCLA, and Arizona all remained within a point or
so of their previous ratings; Washington was up a point, Arizona up a point and
a half.
The second surprise? Stanford, who dropped almost 4 points after their defeat
at the hands of Notre Dame. They now reside deep in the Pac-10 cellar at 56.98
points, ranked 125th in the country, way behind the rest of the Pac-10; you
need binoculars to find them at all.
Cal gained just a fraction from their thorough
defeat of the Oregon Ducks. Read that to mean that the win was expected - and
so didn't much help rankings. Oregon - the third significant mover
this week, dropped 4.2 points. So (in the computer's estimation) Cal performed
about as it should have, Oregon much more poorly than expected.
For those interested in top 10 rankings, here's how it shakes out: Cal
is now at 91.73 points, Tennessee is at 91.14, and USC is at 89.74 (saying in
effect that Cal would beat Tennessee on a neutral field, Tennessee would beat
USC.) This is the first time in years that USC has been ranked anywhere
below the 90s - or even below the 100s for that matter. For what it's
worth, these numbers translate into national rankings as follows: Cal 5th, Tennessee
6th, Michigan 7th,and USC 8th. Isn't that lovely to behold?
(Tennessee took a huge jump of 6.8 points following their decisive 51-33 win
over Georgia to get to that 91.14 rating - now quite close to Cal at 91.73.
So as of now, the two teams are 0.6 points apart. Wouldn't a rematch be fun?)
(Tennessee's high rank is helping Cal - it helps make Cal's season-opening
loss not look so bad. And Cal's performance since is making Tennessee look
good - their win over Cal was over a very good team.)
The AP announced today that Cal had jumped from 16th to 10th place nationally.
Their Poll is more widely followed than Sagarin's calculations, as is the
national Coaches poll. They both suffer, however, from a series of (human)
defects, most notably from east-coast-bias and the fact that most writers and
coaches never have a chance to see many teams play (especially west-coast teams),
hence rely on hearsay or other media. This can easily result in a snowball effect
- "if X or Y like a certain team, that team must be good, so I guess
I'll vote for it."
Sagarin's methodology, on the other hand, is objective - it does
not suffer from these human biases. It has the virtue that the calculations are
applied evenly across the whole nation and therefore take into account both intersectional
games as well in-conference games in a fair way.
(For the uninitiated, these point rankings are computed on a national basis to
find the set of numbers that "best explain" the wins and losses so
far. Best doesn't mean accurate or "guaranteed" - it just means that
no other set of numbers can do any better to explain the results.)
With the latest games factored in, Cal is favored by 7.5 points over Washington
State, 17.3 points over Washington, 14.3 points over UCLA, and 21.8 points over
Arizona. Cal would be favored over USC as noted above, except that a 3.23-point
home field advantage makes the Trojans a 1.2-point favorite over Cal at the Coliseum.
Cal's predicted margin over the Cardinal at this year's Big Game is reaching for astronomical magnitudes: Sagarin's computer says Cal is a 37.9-point favorite. Break out the bubbly, boys, this Big Game is going to be fun. And let's not hear any of that nonsense this year about how "anything can happen in a Big Game."
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