ESPN’s Football Power Index is hard to explain sometimes, and Penn State fans are seeing that right now.
With five top 11 teams losing and four of them to unranked opponents, Penn State, despite winning by 16 against UCLA (it was a 24-point game until the final seconds), FPI not only didn’t move Penn State up but moved it down from No. 8 to No. 9.
Ahead of PSU are No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Ohio State, which will likely be the top two teams in the actual rankings. Where it gets interesting is that No. 3 Alabama— which lost to Vanderbilt Saturday night— No. 4 Georgia, No. 5 Ole Miss, No. 6 Tennessee and No. 7 Notre Dame are all ahead of not only Penn State, but No. 8 Oregon, too, which is undefeated.
By definition, FPI is a “predictiverating system developed by ESPN that measures team strength and uses it to forecast game and season results in American football. Each team’s FPI rating is composed of predictive offensive, defensive, and special teams value, as measured by a function of expected points added (EPA). That rating is the basis for FPI’s game-level and season-level projections.”
The three letters Penn State needs to be thinking about are not “FPI” but “USC.”
Add Nittany Sports Now as a preferred source in Google! Click here to add us.The Trojans were among the five top 11 teams who lost last night, falling on a last-minute touchdown at unranked Minnesota.
Despite losing to a team that came in 2-2, USC only moved down one more spot than PSU did and currently sits at No. 13.
Yeah, FPI is weird, folks.
But it won’t matter if Penn State keeps winning, which it has another chance to do Saturday in the Coliseum. Kickoff is scheduled for 3:30 on Fox.
