2024 NCAA Football Objective Ranks, Week …0?
The very first games of the season have already been played. See what’s new this year.
It’s back! The so called Week 0 — Which has become the official start of the college season — is already over. A small handful of teams got their swings in early. Or, possibly derailed their season before the overwhelming majority of teams even take the field, as we’ve already witnessed. Hi, Florida State!
Some things have not changed. This season we’ll still be tracking all the same objective statistics that have provided unadulterated looks at each team’s performance throughout the season. STem tracks each team’s scoring performance using tempo of play. oSoS shows us a Strength of Schedule that’s free of pollster opinions, or brain-rot, depending on your view of the voters and their inherent bias. PASS measures team performance rated against that objective schedule. Finally we calculate tWin%, a true win percentage that takes on the weight of teams who eat up FCS cupcakes.
How is this different than other outlets? There is no junk data here. You won’t see any stats impacted by opinions, or any human-fabricated numbers. Preseason ranks, recruiting grades, and the team numbers of yesteryear may all carry some kind of value. And yes, entire industries are run based upon some of those. In this space they’re as useless as any other opinion, no matter how educated (Including my own!). The words might have some sass, but the numbers are only based upon what happens out on that football field in 2024.
Why? Because it works. Last year PASS correctly predicted 72.12% of all regular season games. Over the past four years, PASS ranks have routinely been more than 70% accurate in prediction of outcomes. For more on how all this works, check out last year’s primer.
The biggest drawback for this model is that I can’t in good faith create predictions until each team has one week of play under their collective belts. So far, including yesterday’s games (Thursday 8/29), we’ve only had four teams notch wins over FBS division schools. A lot of these Week 1 matchups will be similar blowouts of FCS schools and some of those games will be closer than expected. All of that will create the starting point from which to begin grading each team, their schedules, and future individual matchups.
What’s new this year?
We once again are pinged by “Here comes a new challenger” as Kennesaw State moves up from the FCS to join the ranks of the FBS. As much as I love poring over statistics, I really would love a year off from having to completely reconfigure sheets and sheets of data. 134 teams! What’s not to love. There’s also realignment! Who could forget that California is now part of both the Midwest and the Atlantic seaboard? I do not envy the brave staff responsible for team logistics and travel plans. Anyway, I’m dealing with this by looking to track overall conference strength each week to visualize the changes in power.
So what happened in this “Week 0”? Probably more than most folks expected. While only four games were played and only two were full-fledged FBS matchups, we have two major upsets — Major for very different reasons:
- Last year Florida State had a viable claim to a four-team playoff. Our pocket of the universe over here agreed that FSU should have been in that field with the #3 PASS ranking in the nation. Now that it’s 2024, an opening loss to Georgia Tech already puts them in a worse position than they faced all last year. Fans in Tallahassee get to be the first most-thankful crowd for the arrival of the expanded playoff field.
- New Mexico also fell flat in Week 0, notching the first loss by the FBS against the lower division in FCS’ Montana St. This is a particularly unenviable position to be in, as tWin% penalizes teams who suffer this insult with more than just a simple loss. The Lobos will be fighting upward from the Mountain West basement right from the jump.
While at this point it means very little to the grand scheme, the PASS rankings for Week 0 would be:
- Georgia Tech
- Hawaii
- SMU
- Florida St.
- Nevada
- New Mexico
This is a moment where objectivity ends up being a lot more fun than the media and coaches’ polls. Congrats to the Yellow Jackets who are starting off Week 1 as the #1 team in the nation!
For the full rankings of all 134 teams, a more detailed look at the data, or any other questions, please reach out to me at objectivelydrew@gmail.com. Or just drop me a comment right here!
