Pac-12 Rankings and Projections After Week 11

The rankings within the Pac-12 did get shaken up a bit after last week’s games, but most teams were steady.

Rankings

The Pac-12 now has 6 teams in the CFP rankings as well as in the top-25 of the AP poll: USC, Utah, Oregon, UCLA, UW, and Oregon State. There are only 5 teams in the Coaches poll; Oregon State is not ranked but is getting votes (#27).

A summary of those and many other different rankings for all FBS teams can be found here: https://masseyratings.com/cf/compare.htm

Here is the updated ‘Cool Chart’ which shows the Pac-12 teams in those Composite Rankings.

I’ve added the team names on the right to make it easier to know who is who.

Several teams made big jumps, including Arizona, UW, and Oregon State. WSU also moved up. The separation between the top 7 teams and the next 4 teams remains large; and the separation between those 4 and Colorado also remains large.

Because there is so much going on at the top of the Pac-12, here is a chart showing just the top 6 teams and the changes in the last week.

Utah is now the top team in the rankings, followed closely by USC and then Oregon. UCLA dropped after their loss while UW and Oregon State both moved into the top-25 after their wins.

Here is a comparison for the Pac-12 teams between these Composite Rankings, the SRS (https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/years/2022-ratings.html), the CBS Sports poll (https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/rankings/cbs-sports-rankings) , and the ESPN FPI (https://www.espn.com/college-football/fpi) .

There is very little difference between the Composite Ranking and the SRS; ESPN’s FPI is also very similar except for UCLA. The biggest difference is with Cal-going between 104 in the CBS Sports ranking and being in the 70’s or 80’s on the others. CBS has USC as a top-10 team (which matches the other polls, but the other rankings do not.

Advanced Stats

Last week I included the FEI and Offensive and Defensive FEI ranks for the Pac-12 teams. These get updated each week. Below is a table showing the values from last week and the updated numbers from this week.

Oregon State had the biggest improvement. UW and Arizona also had notable improvements. And each of those teams improved not just overall, but on both offense and defense. Cal, Oregon, and UCLA all dropped overall as well as both offensively and defensively. Stanford dropped overall and on defense, but was unchanged on offense.

It is still the case that the Pac-12 is very good offensively, and not-so-good defensively. Five of the top-12 offensive teams are from the Pac-12. Defensively there are only 3 Pac-12 teams in the top 50. Utah appears to be the most complete team since they are in the top-12 on offense and #31 on defense; that’s possibly why they are ranked the highest.

ESPN FPI

Here is the updated information for the Pac-12 teams including current win projections for the season.

The table includes each teams current win total as well as the number of remaining games where they are favored (win percentage greater than 50%). If you add those numbers together, that should be the same as rounding of ESPN’s projected win total for each team (right-most column).

The Pac-12 now has 7 bowl-eligible teams. Arizona is the only other Pac-12 team that has a chance to make a bowl game. The Wildcats have to win their remaining 2 games. Those games are against WSU and ASU. ESPN’s FPI gives them a better than 20% of winning both games, although both games are at home which should help.

ESPN’s FPI now has UW as a slight favorite in the Apple Cup (win percentage of 50.3%), and they are obviously a heavy favorite (96.6%) over Colorado this weekend.

Here are all of the winning percentages for this week’s Pac-12 games.

Most of the games are expected to be relatively close. Upsets are possible, especially given what happened last weekend. The exception is hopefully the UW-Colorado game. With a win percentage like that this late in the season, an upset would be very unlikely.

After missing on the 2 upsets last weekend, ESPN’s FPI has now been correct for 84% of the Pac-12 games.

Talent Comparison

So far this season the team with more talent (https://247sports.com/Season/2022-Football/CollegeTeamTalentComposite/) in games with Pac-12 teams has won 78% of the games. This is now below the ESPN FPI win projections. Last week the team with the less talent won 5 of the six games. (The only exception was USC beating Colorado.) This week there are 4 teams with less talent that are favored; only USC and UW are the teams with more talent that are favored.

Thoughts

If you want to really get confused, you are in the right place following the Pac-12 because this is what has happened this year:

Colorado beat California, which beat Arizona, which beat UCLA, which beat Utah, which beat USC, which beat Oregon State, which beat Washington State, which beat Stanford, which beat Arizona State, which beat Washington, which beat Oregon, which beat Colorado.

That is a complete circle which includes all of the Pac-12 teams!

At this point in the season, what this means for rankings is that a team that beat another team is going to be ranked below that team. Rankings are going to look at the entire ‘body of work’ and not focus on individual games. There are still a couple of more games, and that ‘body of work’ can be changed, so there can still be some changes coming-especially among the top 6 or 7 teams.