College Football Ratings Week 6 2022
The top 3 teams in the country keep winning, but not without incident. It never really felt like Texas A&M deserved to be in the game against Alabama, but they somehow had a chance to win on the last play. We still have 15 undefeated teams which is quite a lot for this point in the season. Only 11 of them feature on this list. In what will come as a surprise to many, Oklahoma State (#29 in my ratings) is one of the 4 that doesn’t make the cut, along with James Madison, Coastal Carolina and Syracuse.
Top 25
Ohio State
Georgia
Alabama
Texas (+2)
Tennessee (+5)
Michigan (-2)
Mississippi State (+4)
Purdue (-1)
Oregon (+5)
Utah (-5)
Maryland (+4)
Minnesota
TCU (-4)
LSU (-6)
UCLA (+11)
Penn State (+1)
USC (-6)
Clemson (+6)
Florida State (+6)
Kansas State
Notre Dame (+6)
Cincinnati (-9)
Ole Miss (+6)
Texas Tech (+7)
Baylor (-4)
Texas demolished Oklahoma 49-0 and looks like one of the best teams in the country. If it were not for a fluky loss to Texas Tech (where the Longhorns were by far the better team) they would be solidly in the top 10 in the AP Poll as well. Michigan has been 4th in my ratings for the last few weeks but has gotten passed after an underwhelming performance against Indiana. The middle of the Big Ten is stronger than people think as none of Purdue, Maryland or Minnesota are ranked in the AP Poll but I think all are solid top 25 teams.
Moving Up
San Jose State (83rd → 57th) is 4-1 with their only loss being a close one on the road to Auburn. I didn’t think much of the Spartans in the preseason but they might be the favorites to win the Mountain West now. I wrote Georgia Tech (112th → 92nd) off for dead in the preseason but since firing coach Geoff Collins, the Yellow Jackets have won back to back games as underdogs. I’ve been low on Wake Forest (51st → 32nd) all year but they impressed me with a demolition of Army.
Moving Down
My model does not know what to do with Oklahoma (28th → 59th). There is really no precedent in my dataset for a team to fall from playoff contender to bad as quickly as they have in the last few weeks. In September I declared Air Force (44th → 64th) as a potential NY6 team but the Falcons have been all over the place and struggled with a horrible Navy team. I didn’t think Northwestern (101st → 118th) could fall much further, but after a disaster against Wisconsin, the Wildcats now have to be considered the worst team in the Big Ten by a large margin.