The College Football Playoff Committee's official ratings and The Internet's rankings took a major divergence.
For me, I understand where The Internet is coming from a lot more than the CFPC. Auburn is a two loss team. Why are they in the top four with so many one loss team, and a couple undefeated teams standing? I get the argument "well they beat Alabama." Okay, Then why is Alabama dropped to five then? If Alabama is SO good that Auburn defeating them pushes them up to the top four, shouldn't Alabama still be one of the top four teams, with other one loss teams there?
The teams on the Top 25 this week aren't that different from what the alleged professionalsare claiming, but The Internet is having trouble making some distinctions between some of these teams. Here is what The Internet says:
The Internet asked to express its utter confusion at Notre Dame being ranked at #8 in the CFP poll. Notre Dame has never broke the top 10 in its poll, and certainly doesn't understand why it's top 10 still after suffereing its second loss. I tried to explain the concept of marketability but It isn't buying it.
The biggest thing I'm noticing with The Internet's ranking is that it really doesn't penalize losing enough. Or maybe the national ratings punish losing too much for this point in the season. But if you were wondering why South Carolina and Arizona are hanging around, they have been successful overall in their conference. The Internet insists that everyone insists that everyone thinks this is really important so that's what It's going with this season. It also rates UCF, San Diego State and Memphis's conference wins as less important than other team's.
You may notice some of the lower rankings are a lot more similar to most of the national ratings. One of the reasons is that The Internet changed its philosophy a little bit. Here is The Internet's explanation:
It was personally very sad to see Washington State lose this week. I had such high hopes for them. Alas.
Beyond that, their loss really threw The Internet's rankings into a jumble. Its explanation is, "the philosophy I have seen is that teams should not be punished for losing against conference opponents as heavily as non-conference opponents. Therefore conference losses are penalized less seriously." It's an interesting thought, but it does leave to weird things like Duke STILL being ranked. Although I guess their Elo is actually relatively healthy, so it's not THAT weird.
Anyway, I delayed this week's update a few days, because I thought that because ESPN was having a college football ranking show, that the rank was out this week. I thought it might be fun to compare it to those. However, that ranking did not come out, ESPN just had a useless special. The worldwide leader in White Supremacy ruins another day.
