FEI Commentary: Off/Def Ratings and Team Resumes

With the first ratings of the year completely unaffected by preseason projected data, Oregon comes out on top with Auburn at No.2. I also produced the first offensive and defensive FEI ratings of the year and introduced new stat tables for all 120 FBS teams. The FEI top-25 is populated with many of the usual suspects, but more than a  few team ratings stood out, including No. 5 South Carolina (3-2), No. 13 Arizona State (1-3) and No. 35 Utah (6-0). I ran "FEI Resumes" for these teams to figure out what the system likes and doesn't like about those three teams performances to date.

The opponent FEI rating is also provided, as well as a general "Relevance" factor for that particular result for that team. As stated in the FEI principles, my system rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. In the formula, the relevance factor is partly a function of the relative ratings of the two teams. The least relevant results receive about one-eighth as much weight as the most relevant results. For simplicity, I've generalized the relevance data here into three equally distributed categories, High, Med, and Low. Click here for the entrire Week 7 FEI commentary.