OSU 16th in Advanced Ratings Over Last Five Years

This post is an homage to OKC Dave and his deep bag of metrics and advanced stats. Bill C. posted the last five years’ worth of S&P+ ratings recently.

A refresher: S&P+ is a college football ratings system derived from the play-by-play and drive data of all 800+ of a season’s FBS college football games (and 140,000+ plays).

You can read more about how the ratings are calculated here. The short of it is that efficiency, explosiveness, field position and finishing drives are the main factors. It takes some of the randomness out of it and shows how goos you should have been in a given season (if every team had the same schedule). In the long run it is more effective because randomness is negated in the long run.

Anyway, here are the last five years. Look how high OSU comes in despite that egregious 2014 season.

The best part is that No. 16 OSU is closer to No. 2 LSU than No. 2 LSU is to No. 1 Alabama in terms of five-year average. And here’s a look at teams with the most wins in the last five years.

As you can see, the S&P+ takes some of the teams with worse schedules (Cincy, Boise, NIU) out of the equation and bumps others (USC and Michigan) up. Pretty interesting stuff and pretty great that OSU is consistently maintaining a top 20 program.