2024 Season, Week 6 Recap and Final Rankings Right Now Prediction
Oh my god what a Saturday! It seems like every top team lost, where do the current rankings stand?
We’ve seen this before. Everyone has next weekend circled as the best matchup weekend of the season, and overlooked the current, wince at first glance, week. What was supposed to be an average lineup of matchups turned out to be complete madness. With as many upsets as we all got to experience, the next obvious question - What will the rankings look like now?
Final Prediction
Here is the final prediction from the Rankings Right Now algorithm for the next release of the AP poll.
EVERY SINGLE TEAM IS PREDICTED TO MOVE TO A NEW RANKING.
Here are the top storylines to pay attention to from a rankings perspective:
#1 Alabama couldn’t handle the Nashville heat, losing to unranked Vanderbilt
#4 Tennessee lost control of their lead, and the game, against unranked Arkansas
#8 had an INSANE comeback to beat Cal at practically midnight
#9 Missouri looked pathetic against #25 Texas A&M
#10 Michigan lost a tough night road game on the west coast against unranked Washington
#11 USC lost to unranked Wisconsin
#22 Louisville is on a losing streak now, losing to unranked SMU at home
Rankings Right Now LOVES the USA. For the second straight week, it has Army and Navy cracking the top 25
These Tigers Might Not Have #9 Lives
#9 Missouri could get nothing going against #25 Texas A&M. A few weeks ago, Mizzou lost to an unranked Vanderbilt in OT and lost a good amount of ground in the rankings, even after the win. Maybe in hindsight after what Vandy pulled off Saturday against #1 Alabama, Mizzou should have been shown a little more grace.
Rankings Right Now has huge movements for both Mizzou and Texas A&M. So far from this season, we do know that in big upsets, the algorithm tends to be a tad too aggressive in its assumptions of teams moving up, but is fairly accurate in teams dropping. Especially for those top teams. The Mizzou ranking looks appropriate, but Texas A&M will probably be somewhere in the #15 range in my non-algorithm opinion.
UGA over Bama?
Another frequent question I got on Saturday was asking how Georgia could be predicted higher than Alabama when Alabama beat Georgia last week. I understand this scenario doesn’t make logical sense…at first glance. When Team A beats Team B, you’d assume that for a while Team A will be ahead of Team B in the rankings.
But this is not always the case!
The AP poll, and most humans in general, suffer from recency bias. A game last week is now ancient history. If the Alabama team that just lost to unranked Vanderbilt had to play the same day again against Georgia, who beat another unranked SEC team without issues, who would win in that matchup?
Very similar to Rankings Right Now, evaluating these teams are on a week by week basis. Don’t get attached to the hierarchy of who beat who, it’s about who could beat who right now. It’s just like how people assume if you win, you should move up in the rankings. It’s always a little more complicated than it appears.
Where Would Vandy Actually Be?
Vanderbilt is unranked and has had competitive games against two top 10 teams now with their win against #1 Alabama and their loss to Mizzou in Week 4. In the game against Mizzou, Vandy lost in OT after a terrible, terrible missed field goal. After the game was over, Missouri actually dropped in the rankings down to #11 even though they came out victorious because of the lack of respect for Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt has constantly been joked about in the media as the laughingstock of the SEC, but what would their ranking be now had they won that game against Mizzou?
Using the What If simulation tool, we can get insights into this alternate reality where Vanderbilt might have been ranked after their big win against Alabama, had they won their game earlier in the year against Mizzou.
After adjusting for the Week 4 game, now having Vandy win in OT 37-30, that would have meant after this weekend they would have now been projected to be a top 10 team.
What also caught my eye was how Alabama in this scenario only drops three spots. Why? In our current predictions Alabama is predicted to drop down to #7 or #8 area, so why would their drop be less if Vanderbilt had won this game?
It has to do with the algorithm’s perspective of how tough of a matchup the game against Alabama would have been today. Had Vanderbilt won that game in Week 4, which would have been a top ten win, this is where the predicted rankings would have ended up in Week 5.
So now, Vanderbilt is sitting as a 14 ranked team going into Week 5. They would end up being ranked #16 going into this weekend (following a bye week), so now Alabama does not lose to an unranked team, but rather a middle of the pack AP Top 25 team. This means Alabama doesn’t drop down a ton, but rather just a little. It’s a much more even matchup according to the machine learning algorithm.
This one game could have enormous implications for multiple teams in the rankings this year
What About Miami?
A similar scenario with Miami! Miami won in Week 5 by the skin of their teeth against unranked Virginia Tech on a last second Hail Mary that got called back. Then Week 6 they have the biggest comeback in college football this season. They were down by 25 points!
Had Miami ended up losing that game to VT, and lost to Cal on Saturday, where would they be?
Short answer - OUT OF THE TOP 25. Like, way out. Miami is still in a fighting chance to remain relevant in the college landscape, but they seem to be VERY lucky the Virginia Tech ending didn’t take them from a top 10 team to a team not even being considered one of the top 25 best teams in the country.
What’s Next?
Newsletter Monday morning going over the true results of the Week 7 AP Poll rankings and how close they compare to the Rankings Right Now final predictions
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