FEI Ratings and Clemson

Haven't talked to much about advanced statistics and college football, because I generally feel they are worth talking about. There are two major problems: 1) Each play in football relies on so many small, individual contributions adding up to a result that its extremely difficult to model and 2) the sample size of plays and possessions is small relative to other sports. This is particularly problematic in college football when trying to compare two teams in different conferences, because there simply aren't enough of these games.

That being said, I find Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) over at BCF Toys pretty interesting, at least as accurate as the different weekly top 25 polls engineered by different packs of "Smooth" Jimmy Apollos. Not to mention the bastard offspring of those polls, the BCS. They get around the first problem, more or less, by calculating drive-based efficiencies, and not worrying about individual contributions. (Basically assuming that these things will level out over time at a drive-by-drive level). They get around the second problem by, well, they really don't. There's not much you can do but to go with the sample size you've got, not the one you wish you had. I wouldn't start gambling my life savings with FEI, but its certainly useful to get a overall feel of how strong a team's defense and offense is.

At any rate, how did Clemson fare in the preseason? We were #10 in the country (like I said, its far from perfect...hahaha). This ranking was entirely rooted in the strength of our defense, ranked #1. Again, I think you'd have a hard time convincing even the stoutest Clemson fan we have the best defense in the country, although I think you could argue we're in the top twenty pretty easily. But I digress. Our offense was rated 47 out of 116, a below average offense when viewed in the context of the ACC. If anything, I thought that was probably a bit generous, too.

How do we look after week #1? Dropped 6 slots to #16. As the weeks roll on, I'll be expecting a freefall lot of fluctuation, which will stabilize at least after a while. If not, well, advanced stats in football are still a work in progress.