Pac-12 Rankings and Predictions Post Week 7

We are now more than half-way through the season and we have a good idea of which are the top teams and which are not.

Composite Rankings

In previous weeks, I summarized how the Pac-12 teams have done in the various rankings. This week, instead of having lots of tables of numbers (they’ll still be a few), I decided to bring back something like the “cool chart”. This one will be different in that it will have the Pac-12 teams and where they rank among all of the college football teams based on the composite rankings (https://masseyratings.com/cf/compare.htm). These consist of over 70 different rankings including the AP and Coaches polls and rankings from ESPN’s FPI, S&P+, FEI, Sagarin, and many others. As I’ve mentioned before, most of these individual rankings should not be relied on by themselves, but the composite of all of them seems to paint a good picture of the rankings for the teams.

I’ve tried to match the colors of the lines and dots to the actual school colors. In a couple of cases I reversed the primary and secondary colors because there would be a lot of red.

As you can see, the Pac-12 teams have now separated into 4 different groups.

The top group consists of USC, UCLA, Utah, and Oregon. All 4 teams are in the top-25 in this composite ranking as well as in the major polls, although the order here is different than either the AP or the Coaches poll. I think most people would agree that those are the top 4 teams in the conference now and that there is little separation between them.

Between 25 and 50 are 3 more teams: Oregon State, UW, and WSU. This somewhat matches the AP and Coaches polls in that Oregon State is getting votes in the AP poll while UW is getting votes in the Coaches poll. These are also the only other Pac-12 teams that currently have winning records.

The next group consists of Stanford, Arizona State, Cal, and Arizona. It is interesting that there is such a big gap between these teams and the group above. Cal had been in between, but dropped with their loss to Colorado. It shouldn’t be a surprise since none of these teams currently has a winning record. These teams are all between 75 and 100.

And then there is Colorado. They did get a slight bump after upsetting Cal last weekend, but still are ranked below 100 in the composite and in all but a couple of the individual rankings.

While there has been movement (up and down) for teams each of the last few weeks, the lines for each are starting to flatten out. There aren’t the major changes week-to-week. The exception is the drop by Cal after their loss to Colorado. The rest of the teams have largely stayed in the same “lanes” for the last few weeks.

Comment below if you disagree with the relative rankings of the Pac-12 teams.

Of course, there are still over 30 games left to play and some upsets which could lead to more big changes are possible. And there are three games remaining on the schedule between the top 4 teams, including a game this weekend. Those could shake up the rankings.

ESPN FPI Predictions

Here are the updated ESPN win projections for each of the Pac-12 teams along with how that has changed in the last week and since the preseason. Also included is the number of remaining games where they are favored.

Here are their projections for this weekends games.

UW Projections

Looking specifically at UW, here are the win projections for UW’s remaining games according to ESPN’s FPI.

As you can see, there are not many significant changes in UW’s remaining games. The only significant differences are that UW does have a better win projection this weekend and against Colorado compared to their preseason projections.

Here is another set of win projections, this one from Massey Ratings.

These are similar to the ESPN FPI projections except they are lower for all of the games except the Oregon game. The other difference is that this has UW as the underdog in the Apple Cup.