Pac-12 Rankings and Projections After Week 3

Now that there are a few games in for each team, the rankings within the Pac-12 are starting to firm up a bit. For now it appears there are 3 tiers: the top half (consisting of USC, Utah, Oregon, UW, Oregon State, and WSU), the middle (consisting of UCLA, Cal, ASU, Arizona, and Stanford), and Colorado at the bottom. However, we also know that conference play can scramble things a bit. Will Oregon State or WSU drop to the middle? Will UCLA move up? Will Arizona State join Colorado at the bottom? We’ll see how things look after a few weeks of conference play.

Polls

Most Husky fans are now well aware that there are 4 Pac-12 ranked in the top-25 in both the AP and Coaches polls including, of course, UW.

Both Oregon State and Washington State are getting votes in both polls. WSU is the equivalent of #30 in both polls while Oregon State is #32 in the AP and #29 in the Coaches poll.

CBS Sports is continuing to rank all FBS teams each week. Here are where the Pac-12 teams were slotted and the changes from last week. You can find the full ranking of all 131 teams here: https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/rankings/cbs-sports-rankings/

UW made the biggest jump up and Arizona State had the biggest fall.

Here is the ranking of the Pac-12 teams by On3.

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

Among those rankings, UW is as high as #7 in the Keeper’s College Football Ranking and as low as #72 in the RWP Team Rankings. UW’s median rank is #29. You may want to ignore many of those since I’ve found over 20 where UW is ranked below Michigan State, including 16 where Michigan State is still ranked more than 10 places ahead of UW. But it should be noted that in every ranking where UW was ranked low after the first week (lower than 50), UW has moved up in that same ranking. It may take a few more weeks of data to get UW into the top 30 or so in all of the rankings.

Here is where the Pac-12 teams stand in the composite of those rankings.

• Utah (#15)
• USC (#18)
• Oregon (#20)
• Oregon State (#27)
• Washington (#29)
• UCLA (#37)
• Washington State (#38)
• California (#67)
• Arizona State (#75)
• Stanford (#81)
• Arizona (#82)
• Colorado (#116)

ESPN FPI

One of those places that still has Michigan State above UW is in the ESPN FPI. (They also have BYU over 20 spots below Baylor despite beating them.) Here is the updated information for the Pac-12 teams including a comparison to their preseason ranking and win projections.

UW’s win percentage has improved in every game-most by double-digits since the preseason; the exceptions are against Arizona (where UW was already a heavy favorite) and Oregon State (where UW is still a favorite). UW has gone from underdog to favorite against both UCLA and Arizona State. UW is now favored in 8 of their remaining 9 games-the exception is Oregon.

Here are some highlights (and lowlights) from each of the game projections for each of the other Pac-12 teams:

• Arizona is still a heavy underdog in 5 of their remaining 9 games, but they are now favored over Colorado, WSU, and Arizona State.
• Arizona State’s win percentage has dropped by double-digits in almost every remaining game since the preseason, The exception is against UCLA; they had moved to being a favorite last week, but dropped after last weekend.
• California’s win percentage is largely unchanged. They improved against Colorado, where they are now a heavy favorite, and against UCLA where they are still an underdog, but the game is now close to a toss-up.
• Colorado is a heavy underdog in all of their remaining games. Their best chance is when Arizona State visits on October 29 (23.8%).
• Oregon is favored in every game against Utah where it is essentially a toss-up (49.9% for Oregon).
• Oregon State is now favored in 5 of their remaining games. They are still underdogs against USC, Utah, UW, and Oregon.
• Stanford is only favored over Arizona State (62.4%) and WSU (58.3%). Their win percentage against Notre Dame improved, but they are still only at 15%.
• UCLA’s win percentage dropped against every team except Colorado and Arizona State. However, they are still favored in 5 of their remaining games.
• USC’s win percentage improved in every game since the preseason, but was largely unchanged in the last week. They are favored in every game except Utah (46.4%). Before the season they were an heavy underdog to Notre Dame but are now heavy favorite.
• Utah is still favored in all of their remaining games, although their win percentage against USC dropped to 53.6% and it is essentially a toss-up with Oregon (50.1%).
• WSU, despite beating Wisconsin, is only favored in 2 of their remaining games (California and Arizona State), although their win percentage against Stanford and Arizona make those close.

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

If you had used ESPN’s FPI each week to pick the winners of all of the Pac-12 games so far this year, you would have been correct for 85% of them. And in this week’s games, none appear to be very close-but they didn’t give WSU much of a chance against Wisconsin (7.1%) or Eastern Michigan against Arizona State (5.8%).

Talent Comparison

247Sports has their ‘College Team Talent’ (https://247sports.com/Season/2022-Football/CollegeTeamTalentComposite/). If you had picked the winners of the Pac-12 games by picking the team with more talent, you would have been correct for 91% of the games so far this year. The only ‘upsets’ were Air Force beating Colorado, WSU beating Wisconsin, and Eastern Michigan beating Arizona State. If you use that for this week’s games, it would be:

• California (653.38) over Arizona (652.11)
• Utah (705.81) over Arizona State (663.64)
• UCLA (732.85) over Colorado (616.28)
• USC (860.12) over Oregon State (637.42)
• Oregon (877.45) over WSU (565.32)
• UW (761.72) over Stanford (757.81)

This week those projections match up with the ESPN FPI projections. But if you continue to use that ‘College Team Talent’ ranking for the remaining games, you will likely see some more upsets. Will it be more or less than the ESPN FPI? We’ll see. Do you think that you can do better than either of these methods?

Team-Based Advanced Stats

Three of the more commonly mentioned advanced stats ratings for college football teams are the F+, SP+, and the FEI ratings. Here are where the Pac-12 teams rank for each.