FSU is a heavy favorite to wind up in the national title game again.

The Simple Rating System is a set of computer rankings that is focused on only two variables: strength of schedule and margin of victory. I publish weekly college football SRS ratings each season, and you can read more about the SRS there. Last year, I took the Las Vegas point spreads for over 200 college football games to come up with a set of power rankings. By taking every data point, and using Excel to iterate the ratings hundreds of times, I was able to generate a set of implied team ratings.

Well on Friday, the Golden Nugget released the point spreads for 200 games (h/t to RJ Bell). You might not think we can do much with just a couple hundred games, but by using an SRS-style process, those point spreads can help us determine the implied ratings that Las Vegas has assigned to each team.

We don’t have a full slate of games, but we do have at least 1 game for 77 different teams. Theoretically, this is different than using actual game results: one game can be enough to come up with Vegas’ implied rating for the team. Purdue may only have a spread for one game, but that’s enough. Why? Because Purdue is a 21-point underdog at a neutral field (Lucas Oil) against Notre Dame, and we have point spreads for the Fighting Irish in ten other games. Since we can be reasonably confident in Notre Dame’s rating, that makes us able to be pretty confident about Purdue’s rating, too.

The system is pretty simple: I took the point spread for each game and turned it into a marvin of victory, after assigning 3 points to the road team in each game. For example, Alabama is a 6-point home favorite against Auburn. So for that game, we assume Vegas believes the Tide are three points better than the Tigers; if we do this for each of the other 199 games, and then iterate the results hundreds of times, we can come up with a set of power ratings.

Two quick notes about the rankings.

1) These are not intended to be surprise. I know, we’re using a complicated, somewhat mysterious ^[1]The SRS isn’t mysterious, of course — I’ve done as good of a job as I can explaining it, and it’s relatively simple to generate in Excel, but I recognize that to some readers … Continue reading formula to derive them, but all these ratings are intended to do is quantify public perception.

2) These are not “my” ratings. These are simply the implied ratings based on the Vegas points spreads; nothing more, nothing less.

As it turns out, Vegas sees a three-headed tier at the top of college football: Florida State, Alabama, and Oregon have essentially identical ratings, and are a field goal better than the rest of college football. Now each team’s SRS rating has little meaning in the abstract, but the ratings are very useful in a relative sense. For example, since Florida State has an SRS rating of 17.5, it means the Seminoles would be a two touchdown favorite at a neutral site against a team with a rating of 3.5 (Wisconsin, for example). In the table below, I’ve included the number of games for which we have point spreads for each team on the far left. The “MOV” column shows the home field-adjusted average point spread for that team, the “SOS” column shows the average rating of each team’s opponents (for only the number of games for which we have lines), and the “SRS” column shows the school’s implied SRS rating.

FSU is, on average, a 20-point favorite in its games! But that doesn’t mean the Seminoles are better than Oregon or Alabama: after adjusting for strength of schedule, those teams catch up to Florida State. The top of the ratings offers no surprises: Florida State returns Jameis Winston, Oregon brings back Marcus Mariota, and even in a post-A.J. McCarron world, Alabama figures to be Alabama.

Auburn comes in at #4, which feels about right. The Tigers finished 9th in the last edition of the 2013 SRS, but Auburn clearly improved as the season went along last year. With Nick Marshall and Gus Malzahn (even with Greg Robinson and Tre Mason now in St. Louis), Auburn should be a top-five team in 2014.

Oklahoma rounds out the top five, and what’s most interesting about the Sooners is the easy strength of schedule. The Sooners face Louisiana Tech, Tulsa, and Tennessee out of conference this year; the Vols are not expected to be very good, and lines aren’t even up yet for the two cupcake games. In other words, OU’s easy strength of schedule is really a reflection of how Vegas feels about the Big 12, which is to say, not very good (and the line isn’t up yet for the Oklahoma-Kansas game, so the schedule is even easier than these ratings imply). Baylor comes in at #14, Oklahoma State at #21, Kansas State at #24, and Texas at #25.  In recent years, we’ve grown accustomed to the Big Ten and ACC being mediocre, but Vegas seems to be pessimistic about the Big 12 in 2014.

Speaking of the Big Ten, the oddsmakers aren’t very high on the midwest of the country this year. Ohio State is only ranked 10th here, although the Buckeyes are 6th in projected MOV because of their below-average schedule. Michigan State comes in at #13, Wisconsin at #17, and Michigan at #21 is the only other Big Ten school in the top 30.

Let me close with a look at all 200 games, sorted from most impressive line to least impressive. What does most impressive mean? Take the top game on the list: Florida State is listed as a 24-point home favorite against Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish are nearly perfectly average with a rating of -0.1, so that would imply that FSU is 20.9 points better than average. That’s the top implied game rating of the 200 games listed. Of course, each team’s rating in the table above is simply the average of their implied ratings for each game.