I'll preface this by saying I love power ratings.
they summarize so much info.... if the power ratings are based on entire season, they are very stale.... a few services release "recent weight" power ratings, which I love
BUT, I'm finding a huge problem.
take the Big 10 for instance.... but I assume it would be true for all 5 power conferences
so Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State all rank very very high in the rankings.
but how many regular season games have they had the last 2 seasons vs. ranked opponents?
there have been 2 such games... Ohio State vs. Notre Dame twice.......
so how can I link how good these 3 teams are relative to the other 4 power conference teams when there's pretty much no linkage to meaningful games.
So here are 7 games where B10 team played a ranked opponent in regular season in last 2 years:
It just doesn't seem like there's much linkage to say X is 12 points better than Y except for conference games (which is most of the schedule)
the narrative here seems to be bowl games are a joke, but is that really true? I would definitely throw out a few bowl game results due to sit-outs and bad team psychology but maybe the rest of the games should be value... so you would use last year's bowl game results to come up with starting power ratings for a season
for people who don't follow power rating models, I am saying that power ratings (even "recency" ratings) would correlate far too much to start of year power ratings, and someone's subjective judgement as to team strength. or it may link to final power ratings for previous year
like I said, I love power rating models, but I am now fairly skeptical of them.
FYI, you have to use beginning power ratings in your calculation up till week 6 or so as the 130 teams won't be linked by common opponents. if you've ever seen a power rating based solely on current year results but in week 7 when the teams finally link, you get some crazy results, like Wake Forest #1 team in country (not this season, but recently). but that's what the model spits out.