Top 10 Rankings: KPI Week 14

With the regular season over for most schools and only conference championships and bowl games left for the top ranked teams, here are my KPIs through Week 14.

The KPI (Kraus Performance Index) is a rating placed on each game played by the teams in the 6 BCS conferences plus a few of the BCS “Spoilers.” It is intended to gauge how well each team plays each week.

KPI is based on win/loss, margin of victory, total yardage (for/against), turnovers, and time of possession. It also factors in home/away, shutouts, opponents’ ranking, and playing non-BCS conference schools.

Here are the top teams average KPI through Week 14:

Rank	School	KPI	Wins	Losses
1	Florida	81.27	11	1
2	Oklahoma	77.26	11	1
3	USC	76.73	10	1
4	Alabama	75.14	12	0
5	Texas	72.56	11	1
6	Penn State	70.93	11	1
7	Texas Tech	62.17	11	1
8	Utah	48.39	12	0
9	Boise State	47.72	12	0
10	Ohio State	47.48	10	2

I also indexed the six BCS conferences:

Conference	KPI
Big 12	25.24
SEC	23.59
Big Ten	17.88
ACC	16.16
Big East	14.29
Pac-10	11.45

So what does this mean? To me it means that Florida and Alabama both head to a BCS bowl game and the Big 12 sends two schools as well. These won’t be determined until the BCS rankings come out, and it is possible that Missouri will win the championship game and completely screw this up. I think the ACC, Big East, Pac-10 and Big Ten only get one school into BCS bowls because both Utah and Boise State get the nod.

Ohio State could beat both Utah and Boise State (as well as Cincinnati and the ACC title game winner), but Utah and Boise State earned their way in. They both went undefeated and dominated their opponents most weeks. Plus, there is a lot of pressure to bring in BCS busters, especially given that great Boise State-Oklahoma game.

Just for fun, I decided to rank the top 10 and bottom 10 performances of the year.

The top 10 KPI games of the year:

Week	Team	Score	Opp.	Opp. Score	KPI
13	Oklahoma	65	Texas Tech	21	185.00
11	Texas Tech	56	Oklahoma St.	20	170.65
1	Alabama	34	Clemson	10	169.26
10	Florida	49	Georgia	10	164.21
7	Florida	51	LSU	21	159.28
9	Texas Tech	63	Kansas	21	156.94
3	USC	35	Ohio State	3	147.52
8	USC	69	Washington St.	0	141.63
8	Ohio State	45	Michigan St.	7	138.05
5	Alabama	41	Georgia	30	136.18

The bottom 10 KPI games of the year:

Week	Team	Score	Opp.	Opp. Score	KPI
2	Washington St.	3	California	66	(91.75)
13	Minnesota	0	Iowa	55	(86.43)
5	Washington State	14	Oregon	63	(82.30)
9	Washington	7	Notre Dame	33	(80.63)
10	Washington St.	0	Stanford	58	(80.38)
7	Washington St.	13	Oregon St.	66	(80.10)
13	Indiana	10	Purdue	62	(77.59)
3	UCLA	0	BYU	59	(68.51)
11	Washington St.	28	Arizona	59	(67.87)
13	North Carolina	10	North Carolina St.	41	(67.09)

Producing the KPI was a fun and fairly time-consuming exercise every week. The time was well spent as entering all the game statistics into my spreadsheet made me a much better informed fan.

I plan to continue to calculate the KPI through the end of the year—bowl games included. I will then recalibrate some of my calculations for next year and try it again.

Anyone interested in seeing the details of calculations, just drop send me an email. I am happy to send out the spreadsheet (in Excel 2007 format).