The list of college football national championship contenders got rearranged this morning, and one fourth quarter did most of the rearranging. ESPN pushed out its FPI projection of the top 15 title hopefuls heading into Week 3, with Ohio State, Texas, Georgia and Michigan carrying the headline billing. The names are not a surprise. The order is where the interesting part lives.
Here is what matters about a model refresh this early. FPI is a predictive efficiency system, not a beauty contest, so it does not care that a team looked cool doing it. It cares how a team performed relative to who it performed against. That means the single biggest input available to it right now is Texas going into the fourth quarter down twenty against Ohio State and walking out of the building with the win behind Arch Manning. One game. Two teams at the top of the sport. Every result on the board reweighted at once.
And people watched it happen. The reporting on the television numbers says Texas-Ohio State delivered a massive audience for ESPN, which is its own kind of data point: the sport's center of gravity is currently sitting in that matchup, and the model is just agreeing with the eyeballs.
The honest caveat is that a projection built on two and a half weeks of football is mostly preseason opinion wearing a lab coat. Roster talent and recruiting history still do heavy lifting inside these systems in September. That is not a flaw, it is arithmetic. There is simply not enough played football yet to overrule what everyone already believed in August.
checked the almanac: the 2014 Ohio State team lost at home to Virginia Tech in early September and finished the year hoisting the first College Football Playoff trophy. one bad night in week two has never once closed a door in this sport.
What I am watching next is Saturday, when the resumes start filling in. Georgia goes to Arkansas at noon. Ohio State hosts Kent State, Michigan hosts UTEP, and neither of those tells us much of anything. Georgia on the road in the SEC tells us plenty.