Blind College Football Playoff Resumes for the Top 10 Contenders

Ranking College Football Playoff contenders is an obviously imperfect science that lends itself to bias at all levels.

But the bias in question is not always the conference bias (homerism) or recency bias (prisoner-of-the-momentism) most commonly associated with college football. More often than not, the bias secretly informing the rankings is what's known as the bias blind spot—the bias of failing to account for one's own bias.

The best way to control for this type of bias is to strip away the nonessential factors (team names, coach names, etc.) and judge the teams based strictly on their resumes. "Numbers never lie" is an embellishment...but they do lie a lot less often than people.

On that note, here is a look at the Top 10 teams in the Associated Press poll—only this time, their names have been omitted. The SOS column (seen below and on the subsequent table) refers to the Strength of Schedule numbers at TeamRankings.com:

Team	SOS	Record	Top 25 Wins*	Who Beat Them?*
Team 1	1	7-1	20	7
Team 2	3	6-1	11, 16	1
Team 3	30	7-0	6, 22	—
Team 4	12	6-1	22	NR
Team 5	27	7-1	17	5
Team 6	9	7-0	4, 16	—
Team 7	29	6-1	—	2
Team 8	2	7-1	3	16
Team 9	16	7-1	8, 25	14
Team 10	11	6-1	19	12

*Note: Numbers refer to the current AP ranking of the opponent in question. Numbers in bold refer to a true road win or a true home loss—i.e., are extra-impressive in Column 4 but extra-indicting in Column 5. 

Everyone who looks at this table sees something different because everyone who follows college football values something different.

Is strength of schedule more important than record? How much does home-field advantage matter? Should we judge teams more on whom they have beaten, or whom they were beaten by?

Here is how I—subjectively—would rank these teams based on the numbers above (including their records) and nothing else:

1. Team 6
2. Team 3
3. Team 2
4. Team 1
5. Team 8
6. Team 10
7. Team 9
8. Team 5
9. Team 7
10. Team 4

But wins and losses are not the only things that matter.

They are the things that matter most, but in a sport such as football, which so famously so often comes down to inches, they are not a faultless metric of which teams are better than others .

"Championship teams are generally defined by their ability to dominate inferior opponents, not their ability to win close games," is one of the self-described "basics" at Football Outsiders, the Internet's preeminent source of advanced football metrics.

Here is a look at each team's statistical profile: 

	SOS	Points/Game Margin*	Yards/Game Margin*	Yards/Play Margin*
Team 1	1	22.5 (4)	231.6 (2)	2.51 (1)
Team 2	3	18.6 (8)	134.5 (4)	1.84 (5)
Team 3	30	16.3 (9)	68.2 (10)	1.39 (8)
Team 4	12	23.4 (3)	116.5 (5)	1.89 (4)
Team 5	27	25.2 (2)	235.9 (1)	2.07 (2)
Team 6	9	20.7 (6)	91.8 (8)	1.23 (9)
Team 7	29	14.3 (10)	103.3 (7)	0.85 (10)
Team 8	2	21.4 (5)	113.3 (6)	1.51 (7)
Team 9	16	19.6 (7)	72.5 (9)	1.80 (6)
Team 10	11	28.8 (1)	201.1 (3)	1.98 (3)

*Calculated by subtracting points, yards and yards per play allowed per game from points, yards and yards per play scored/gained per game.

And here is how I—subjectively—would rank these teams based on the numbers above and nothing else (including record):

1. Team 1
2. Team 10
3. Team 4
4. Team 5
5. Team 2
6. Team 8
7. Team 6
8. Team 9
9. Team 3
10. Team 7

Talk about counterintuitive. The teams I ranked No. 1 and No. 2 based on the first table—i.e., the two unbeaten teams in the AP Top 10—are No. 7 and No. 9  based on statistical dominance.

The numbers used above are flawed, slightly, because they don't weigh for garbage time vs. non-garbage time, which in one case makes a huge difference based on what we know outside of the blind-resume treatment. But for now, it's a staggering conclusion.

Which leads us to our final table: the composite of the two things we just looked at. Based on how I ranked the blind resumes in the previous sections, here is how the Top 10 teams stack up (and how that stack-up compares with the actual Week 10 AP poll).

If their blind score was the same, I made a subjective decision between them using either record (when applicable) or head-to-head analysis. But that analysis, while also subjective, was made without considering the teams or any of the games I've seen them play.

Everything was done in the blind:

	Identity	Avg. Blind Score	Blind Rank	AP Rank	Difference
Team 1	Alabama	2.5	1	3	+2
Team 6	Misssissippi St.	4.0	2	1	-1
Team 2	Auburn	4.0	3	4	+1
Team 10	TCU	4.0	4	10	+6
Team 3	Florida St.	5.5	5	2	-3
Team 8	Ole Miss	5.5	6	7	+1
Team 5	Michigan St.	6.0	7	8	+1
Team 4	Georgia	6.5	8	9	+1
Team 9	Oregon	7.5	9	5	-4
Team 7	Notre Dame	9.5	10	6	-4

So...there you have it.

Alabama has the best resume in the country. TCU deserves to be ranked much higher than it is. Florida State, Notre Dame and Oregon have all played worse than their records/rankings suggest.

Or at least that's the conclusion I have drawn. Again, everybody values something different. Blind resumes are like a Rorschach test, and these numbers, as alluded to above, are slightly imperfect.

Sound off below if you saw something I didn't see.

Unless otherwise cited, all stats courtesy of cfbstats.com 

Follow Brian Leigh on Twitter: @BleighDAT