The surprising case for Alabama as a national championship contender

Alabama came out really strong this season.

They started 5-0 before that Georgia game, and they won every single one of those games by two touchdowns or more.

Alabama shot up my primary college football rankings.

These are the ones that I usually save for paying members of the site.

I have found that the best way to make predictive college football rankings is to aggressively adjust after every game.

Every week, I will take both market data and then play-by-play data from the games, and then I will adjust every team based on those metrics.

After the Georgia game, Alabama ranks fourth in the nation.

That is a very solid rise from 13th in the preseason, and that makes them a national championship contender.

For comparison, Georgia is ranked second right now.

If Georgia and Alabama were to play in the SEC championship game at a neutral site next week, I'd make Georgia about a two-point favorite.

However, there's another way to rate college football teams.

In this method, I will take data from the current season.

This will be metrics like success rate, yards per play, and even simple ones like margin of victory in games.

For each one of these metrics, I will adjust for strength of schedule based on my mathematical algorithms at the power rank, and then I'll combine everything back together to get my best estimate for how these teams have performed based only on data from this season.

In this calculation, Alabama is the best team in the country.