The AP's No. 1 Team Lost at Oklahoma. By the Numbers, It Was a Coin Flip, and Texas Was Seventh Anyway.
Six ranked teams lost Saturday. Four of them were flipping coins, one got outplayed by UCLA, and one lost on turnovers.
Texas went into Saturday as the number one team in the AP poll. It came out of Saturday having lost 27-24 at Oklahoma. That sounds like a shock. It wasn't. The poll was wrong first.
THE NUMBER ONE TEAM WASN'T
Our blend has Texas seventh. Georgia is first. That gap existed before kickoff and the game didn't contradict it. Per play, Texas and Oklahoma were a wash: Texas averaged minus 0.08 points per play, Oklahoma minus 0.02. Success rate was 35 percent to 34. Texas outgained Oklahoma 382 yards to 238 and still lost, because it turned the ball over twice and Oklahoma didn't. That's a coin flip that landed on the wrong side, not a verdict.
Oklahoma is the weird part. Its defense is fourth in our blend. Its offense is 84th. That defense is how a team with the 84th-best offense beat the AP's top team.
SIX RANKED TEAMS LOST. FOUR WERE FLIPPING COINS.
Alabama lost 20-17 to Georgia. Per-play efficiency was +0.23 to +0.20. LSU lost 35-34 at Kentucky: +0.14 to +0.11. Pittsburgh lost 21-17 to North Carolina. Add Texas and that's four ranked losses where the play was worth three points or less either way.
The other two were different. Oregon lost 17-15 to UCLA and got off easy. Oregon averaged minus 0.51 points per play, gave it away six times to UCLA's three, and gained 242 yards to 345. The numbers say UCLA should have won by about 18. Florida lost 38-19 to South Carolina, a team we rank 42nd. That one is mixed: Florida lost the per-play battle but tied on success rate, 44 to 43, and turned it over three times to none.
THE CAVEAT THAT MATTERS
The opponent-adjusted rating does most of the work in this ranking, and it hasn't updated since Week 4. Two full weeks of games are only showing up through the small play-by-play slice. So Oregon at ninth, Florida at 13th and Washington at 31st are ceilings, not verdicts. Washington has lost three straight, the last 41-24 to Iowa, where it lost success rate 66 percent to 36.
One more for the record book: Kentucky is 5-1 with two one-point wins, over South Carolina and LSU. The numbers have them 47th. Nebraska is the opposite case: 5-1, unranked by the AP, 17th for us, and its only loss was by three to Indiana, our number four team. The schedule is soft, so call it untested, but the number is real.
Six weeks in, one Saturday of coin flips tells you about the poll, not about how the season ends.