Oklahoma State’s Ranking Nationally Over the Last Four Years is Pretty Great

FEI is Brian Fremeau’s rating system. Here’s a brief description:

The Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) considers each of the nearly 20,000 possessions every season in major college football. All drives are filtered to eliminate first-half clock-kills and end-of-game garbage drives and scores. A scoring rate analysis of the remaining possessions then determines the baseline possession efficiency expectations against which each team is measured. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams, win or lose, and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.

I simply averaged his unit rankings for offense and defense over the last 4 seasons to come up with a 4-year program ranking on both side of the ball. Let’s start with offense.

OSU comes in at No. 21 – not bad, especially considering how bad last year’s offense was. If you take away last year, our average would be ranked No. 7, just behind Oklahoma. Still, look at how efficient the offenses in the Big 12 are. OSU at No. 21 is behind No. 2 Baylor, No. 6 Oklahoma, No. 10 Texas Tech, and No. 17 Kansas State.

I extended the rankings down to No. 31 to pick up OSU. Not great, but I know a lot of long-time OSU fans would be happy to have a top 30ish defense on a consistent basis. The 2013 defense was elite — shame it came up one stop short of a second Big 12 Championship for OSU. The advanced stat systems never loved this OSU defense, which made me a little skeptical about them – but even I bought in pretty heavy. Then we played two great offenses.

All I did here was average the four-year rankings together. No surprise that Alabama is at No. 1 – the only school with both units in the top five. OSU finishes tied for 17th nationally and 3rd in the conference behind No. 3 OU and No. 16 Baylor. You have to feel pretty good about that considering that our best team (2011) is not factored in to this ranking. Gundy has his strengths and weaknesses, but he (and Boone) have made OSU a top 25 program.