Last week’s #1 Ohio State beat #110 Miami of Ohio soundly – so, of course, they dropped a spot. Last week’s #2 Wisconsin looked dominant against #23 Michigan and dropped all the way to #12. For those who haven’t seen the GCR before, this is how things work. Each teams SOS changes each week (even if they are on a bye) based on how the teams they already played fare. The Perfomance Score is similarly impacted although not as much. And for each game played, the team’s denominator changes. All of that to say, expect pretty major fluctuations week over week. The same rules apply to all teams so the ratings are unbiased. When you find your team, you may not like where they fall, but the math is the math. A friend asked me yesterday to name the only team with two top 25 wins so far. If you look at the AP poll, it’s clearly his alma mater Auburn with victories over Oregon (36) and Texas A&M (52) so that is not the cases with the GCR. In fact, only 5 teams in the current GCR top 25 have even 1 win against a fellow member: Ohio State (2) over Cincinnati (18), Alabama (5) over Duke (14), Wisconsin (12) over Michigan (23), Wake Forest (20) over Utah State (13), and California (22) over Washington (24). Some of those teams (probably the majority of them) won’t end up in the top 25 this year. Each week the wins against top 25 recalculates against the current list. In the AP world they keep the rank of the week played. A few years ago, in Spurrier’s last season with South Carolina (180), the Gamecocks were a preseason top 15 team and opened the season with Texas A&M (52). The game was hyped to the nth degree and the Aggies crushed the ‘Cocks by a margin I don’t want to remember. South Carolina ended up 3-9 that season and, clearly, unranked, but A&M got credit for beating a ranked team – silly, right? The GCR takes care of that. Later in the season, we’ll talk about that more. The ranking for this week is below – look for tonight’s analysis on how conferences are looking for the playoffs – it’s not pretty for some.
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