ESPN's Football Power Index projects every SEC team's win/loss record
ESPN has once again updated its Football Power Index, “a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance going forward for the rest of the season.” One quirk of the FPI is that when projecting a team’s record, it gives partial numbers due to “differing number of games played in each simulation” (the FPI’s projected results are based on 20,000 simulations).
With that in mind, here are the final records the FPI is projecting for all 14 SEC teams:
- Alabama: 10.9-1.7
- Georgia: 10.2-2.4
- Florida: 9.7-2.7
- LSU: 9.6-2.6
- Auburn: 9.1-3.0
- Texas A&M: 8.9-3.2
- Kentucky: 7.0-5.0
- Tennessee: 6.3-5.7
- Ole Miss: 6.1-5.9
- Missouri: 6.0-6.0
- South Carolina: 5.8-6.2
- Arkansas: 5.0-7.0
- Mississippi State: 4.6-7.4
- Vanderbilt: 3.2-8.8
It’s worth noting that the FPI rankings are higher on LSU and Auburn than Florida, but the projected outcomes factor in the difficulty of schedule. This also explains why South Carolina’s FPI (39) is higher than Missouri’s (55), but the Gamecocks are projected to come up with fewer wins than the Tigers.
The complete FPI can be found here.
Miss State will be much better than that. UT probably better than UK this year. top 5 looks about right. little optimistic for Arkansas even though most of the non-conference is as soft as Charmin
Interesting that the bottom eight teams all have totals that equal exactly 12.0, while the top six are all over 12. Why?
Could be including the SEC title game. If you add the amount of games over 12 for the top six teams, you get exactly two extra games.
“One quirk of the FPI is that when projecting a team’s record, it gives partial numbers due to ‘differing number of games played in each simulation’ (the FPI’s projected results are based on 20,000 simulations).”
Yeah but they still end up with an average W-L record for each team. The teams that don’t win a division in any simulation have exactly 12 games each. The extra decimal fractions for the top six teams are probably for the SEC title game. The numbers for the top six teams come out to exactly two extra games above the total for 12 games each, exactly one for the West and exactly one for the East. Gotta be the SEC title game.
Of course they still had an average record? I think we’re interpreting it the same way.
Wish there was more information on how FPI is calculated and/or retrospective analysis and comparison to other rankings and projections.
If I’m understanding this correctly, FPI has the following probabilities (likely rounded) for division winners:
East – UGA 60%, UF 40%
West – Bama 60%, LSU 20%, Auburn 10%, A&M 10%
That looks right. I would have preferred that they leave the CCG out of these calculations so we had equal numbers across the board.
They should have just given Auburn’s and aTm’s 10% to LSU and called it good. Ten percent isn’t enough to even count really and chances are LSU or Bama will take those 10% chances away from them anyway.
Simulations can be manipulated easily..but SOME teams are really overrated and some under….
Can’t we just move Vanderbilt to the Always Cushy Conference(ACC). Hey, they could maybe win five(5) games a year and the players could feel good about something involving football.