Alabama holds the top spot at 8-0 heading into their Week 11 tilt with LSU in Baton Rouge. The Tide have, for weeks now, looked like the class of the college football landscape but can the Tide “hold that Tiger” in a feisty Death Valley this Saturday?
#7 Auburn, who is a game behind Bama and already holding a head-t0-head victory over LSU is hoping for a huge upset in Baton Rouge. The Tigers held off Ole Miss this weekend to keep their SEC West title hopes alive.
#2 Clemson also held off a similarly hard-charging Florida State team beating the Seminoles in their own Death Valley this past Saturday to maintain their undefeated record.
Perhaps the biggest surprise(s) amongst the top 25 this week is the emergence of mid-major and #10 Western Michigan as well as 6-1 and #11 Troy. Those two teams are ranked higher than midway up the rankings by result of their high-ish margin of victory tally (WMU at 25.1 and Troy at 17.7). Both would be ranked higher if it weren’t for their unsurprisingly low SOS marks–both are lower than 50% for their opponents’ marks.
WMU is leading the MAC at 8-0 and likewise undefeated in conference games while Troy’s only loss came against #2 Clemson earlier this year.
The SEC holds the top spot amongst conferences in the Bassford Power Index. The ACC comes up just behind their southeastern counterparts with two teams in the top 10, Clemson and Louisville.
One mid-major ranks higher than a Power 5 conference as The American conference–with two top 25 teams in Houston and Temple–leads the Big 12 by a small margin. The Big 12 doesn’t have a single team in the top 10 and their top ranked team from last week, West Virginia, dropped a critical game this weekend lowering their ranking down to 22nd this week.
The below is a compiled record tally for the Bassford College Football Matrix rankings throughout the 2016 season. The final column on the right records the overall FBS record for home teams by respective week of the season.
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