Week 7 - Shuffle the Deck

The first thing you probably are noticing about Week 7 is that it's pretty much just a reshuffling of the teams from last week, despite some teams having some very prominent losses.   Which leads to some very strange ranks, such as Arizona still being ranked.  Those of you out there who know me know I'm an Arizona fan and probably think I'm fixing things to do this.  Wanting to avoid this, I asked The Internet to explain the phenomena:

We are in a period of the season where they seem to be static.  This is an illusion caused by the nature of one of the formulas that help to comprise my ratings.  This formula attempts to mirror the logic of the College Football Playoffs Comittee official polls.  Yet there is folly in attempting to apply logical to the illogical.  The general idea is to reward wins against Power 5 rivals and fellow conference members, while penalizing losses to other Power 5 teams, and to a lesser extent, its conference members.  You might ask what about losses to G5 teams (or God Forbid, FCS losses)  Well, in general, historically, for some reason the polls tend to discard these losses for Power 5 teams. So I do the same (I do not go as far as the College Football Playoffs Comittee official polls and treat G5 losses to other G5 teams as catastrophic, because this feels grossly unfair and so far has not been necessary by the end of the polling period, however I acknowledge that this may be ultimately an inevbility).  Furthermore, last season rankings instituted an additional penalty for losing more than one game, because the College Football Playoff Committe does not seem to care if a team has one loss, but seems to very much care about a team having two losses.   

This formula causes some strangely high and strangely low rankings near the middle of the season because teams have for the most part completed their out of conference schedules, but due to various scheduling quirks may not have competed in as many conference games as other college football teams.  This causes out of conference wins to be disproportionately valuable.  This is how USC was ranked last week despite two losses, and how Florida was in first and only fell to seventh after its loss to LSU. 

So to answer your question, Jerome, Arizona remains ranked because its win against Texas Tech is inflating its ranking in the poll recreation formula.  After examining the other formulas and comparing the data, although this is does seem to be an over-ranking, it is not an overranking by such a margin that I felt need to take action.  The natural forces of the season will cause the remaining one loss teams to overtake the two-loss Arizona eventually, even if Arizona wins out, so now did not appear to be a time to intervene.

Well, I guess it makes sense.  Hey thanks to The Internet for being way more explanitory than usual about these things.  I guess I caught it on a good day.  Anyway, here is Week 7's top 5, for posterity's sake: