Pac-12 Power Rankings, Week 13: A reasonable reaction, frankly.

Life is pain.

Leland: The Pac-12 was relatively quiet this past week with no real upsets to speak of—which was quite upsetting for Cal Football.

Here’s what happened in this… splendid week of football.

• #19 Utah def. Colorado, 28–13

• Washington State def. Washington, 40–13

• #11 Oregon def. Oregon State, 38–29

• Arizona State def. Arizona, 38–15

• #6 Notre Dame def. Stanfurd, 45–14

• UCLA def. California, 42–14

• #13 BYU def. USC, 35–31

Looking back at these results—and at the season as a whole—our mission was to socially distance in the palatial NHook estate and debate and discuss how we would grade the Pac-12 teams in terms of on-field performance and morale over the entirety of the season, but particularly for the recent weeks.

No upsets make you upset? Happy shirt and sad face?

Note that some of these votes were cast before the game-changing news of USC’s home-run hire of Lincoln Riley and WSU’s announcement to DTR with Jake Dickert and go steady. (Which means a bunch of us were super-before the hiring of Kalen DeBoer by Washington.)

Christopher_h: I believe this is the last Power Rankings until after bowl season, so I will write my blurbs under the assumption that Cal rightfully smashed USC into oblivion.

Berkelium97:  At this point we have some clear tiers and the weekly exercise is to determine the order within each tier. 

• Contenders: Utah, Oregon

• Should-have-beens: ASU, UCLA, WSU, OSU

• Frustrated teams that can still win occasionally: Cal, Colorado

• Please-let-the-season-be-over teams: Washington, Arizona, USC, LSJU

---

The rankings

Last week: 1

Christopher_h (1): The score may have been closer than it appeared, but Utah dominated the game against Colorado and was in complete control the entire time—Utah had 445 total yards to just 148 yards for Colorado. They already smashed Oregon once, but which team does better with a couple weeks of film study in the meantime? I’m still leaning towards Utah as they are the more complete team and have young but fearsome offensive and defensive lines.

Berkelium97 (1): I wish they had figured out the QB situation earlier because this team is good enough to be a playoff contender.

Last week: 2

Christopher_h (2): Oregon moved the ball at will in the first half (307 total first half yards), and DE Kayvon Thibodeaux was an incredibly disruptive force all game. The loss of LB Noah Sewell definitely hurt Oregon as OSU started to find offensive success running the ball after his injury in the 3rd quarter and his status should definitely be monitored before the conference championship. Oregon blocked well all game and had no problem running the ball against OSU—they only needed a couple of good passes from QB Anthony Brown to keep OSU off-balance. Oregon played one of their best games against OSU, but they’re going to need to stay sharp and hope Utah has a bad game if they’re going to win the conference. In my view, Oregon is a definitive underdog for the title game.

Berkelium97 (2): I wouldn’t have been shocked to see them lose the Platypus Bowl, but that first half was dominant enough to give them a glimmer of hope in the Pac-12 Championship Game.  Still, they’re going to get smashed by Utah again.

Last week: 5

Christopher_h (3): A historic Apple Cup for Wazzu—Wazzu’s largest margin of victory in Apple Cup history and the first time a team has scored more than 35 points on Washington since 2014. Wazzu dominated the first half, but struggled in the redzone (FG, FG, missed FG), which allowed UW to keep the game close after a single good drive (13–7 Wazzu at half despite Wazzu outgaining UW 255 yards to 63 yards at that point). However, Wazzu kept setting nice blocks for RB Max Borghi, which set up a big game for him (129 yards, 2 TDs) and was driving down the field at will in the second half, with QB Jayden de Laura not afraid to challenge the future NFL corners of Washington (although he typically went after the safeties instead). I’m happy for interim coach Jake Dickert for having success after the previous doofus was fired and Wazzu was just 9 points away (by Oregon State) from a Pac-12 Championship berth.

Berkelium97 (3):  Rushing the field in Seattle is exactly what Cougs fans deserve after surviving all that Rolovich stupidity earlier in the year.

Last week: 3

Christopher_h (6): I’m still not giving them respect because they don’t deserve any. They are exactly who we thought they were. They did exactly what we expected them to do. Why Cal played so much worse than expected is beyond me. 

Berkelium97 (4): I’d offer some insightful thoughts, but I cannot get the ringing of that Victory Bell out of my head.

Last week: 4

Christopher_h (4): OSU had a baffling strategy of chasing two-point conversions (starting with a touchdown to make it 24–9 Oregon prior to the PAT), ultimately going 1-for-4 in their two-point tries. Just like the Cal–TCU game, the aggressiveness changed the course of the game. After three straight missed two-point conversions, OSU found themselves down 31–21 Oregon instead of 31–24 Oregon, which of course changes how you call plays late in the fourth quarter when it’s a two-possession game instead of a one-possession game. OSU did a poor job of game-planning for DE Kayvon Thibodeaux—while Utah in the previous week drew up plays where they ran the ball away from Thibodeaux or used Thibodeaux’s over-penetration against him (e.g. throwing to a receiver in the flat vacated by Thibodeaux), OSU had a bunch of questionable plays where they asked their tight end to block Thibodeaux one-on-one in critical fourth-and-short runs, etc., which obviously failed. Part of the reason Thibodeaux was such a big presence in this game was due to how unprepared OSU seemed to be for Thibodeaux in this game. 

Berkelium97 (5):  A seven-win season is a solid achievement for this team this year.  But after being 5–2 after beating Utah a month ago, it’s hard not to feel like the team could have achieved more.

Last week: 6

Christopher_h (5): ASU rarely threw the ball as they were able to reliably move the ball on the ground with runs by RB Rachaad White and QB Jayden Daniels. ASU ran the ball with ease, with the ASU lines dominating Arizona and QB Jayden Daniels didn’t even need to throw the ball to advance the offense. They didn’t really play all that much better than Arizona (not many of Arizona’s opponents do), but some lucky breaks made this score tilt more heavily in their favor than it should have otherwise.

Berkelium97 (6): Eight wins and a 6–3 record in conference are impressive, but this still feels like a disappointing season for ASU.  Offensive inconsistency, turnovers, and dumb penalties have held them back on many occasions this season.

Last week: 7

Christopher_h (7): Well sure, the bad version of Cal showed up against UCLA and was completely embarrassed. But the good version showed up to completely annihilate USC, like… 33–20 Cal? It just hit me that Cal played like the Stanford of the Cal-Stanford matchup.

Berkelium97 (7):  Bad Cal showed up and it was uuuugly.  Poor execution on offense, inability to adapt to what the defense is doing (DC Jerry Azzinaro is going to run a billion blitzes? WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING?!), and a defensive regression in the second half all combined for yet another miserable day in Pasadena.  It’s no Tucson, but Pasadena has been an awful, awful place for the Bears in recent (and not-so-recent) memory.

Last week: 9

Christopher_h (8): USC was down 35–31 to BYU late in the game. USC drove down the field and with less than a minute left on fourth and 6, QB Jaxson Dart threw a 5-yard slant to lose the game. Donte Williams might be an excellent recruiter and decent position coach (USC’s secondary is god-awful so I really can’t give him too much credit), but he’s not ready to be the CEO of a program as his coaching has led directly to USC losses this season. 

Berkelium97 (9):  Well, I might as well savor ranking them this low now that they’ve hired Lincoln Riley. 

Last week: 8

Christopher_h (9): An interception, some key fourth-down stops, and a 100-yard kickoff return TD helped keep the score closer than it should have been, but the constant pressure on QB Brendon Lewis resulted in a struggling pass offense that the Buffs are in dire need of fixing for next season. QB Brendon Lewis will need to grow as a passer and some better offensive line play can help Colorado’s talented running backs break free for big gains more often. 

Berkelium97 (8):  A month ago, a four-win season looked like a reasonably optimistic outcome, so Buffs fans have some reason to step off the ledge.  But still, four wins.

Last week: 10

Christopher_h (10): If five-star QB Sam Huard is the future, then the future looked grim for Washington fans last Saturday. Washington was probably trying to build his confidence and let him play with a full playbook (a lot of teams baby new quarterbacks, only calling short screen passes and other generally safe plays), but it likely backfired as Huard threw no touchdowns and four interceptions. (The fourth INT was TE Devin Culp’s fault, but the other three definitely belong to Huard.) Huard had a couple nice throws, but they might be hard to find in the middle of the rest of the garbage he threw, rolling out of the pocket and throwing across his body. UW’s defense coasted on their NFL-caliber secondary, but they couldn’t stop the run at all and their offense was embarrassing. UW was one of the few teams to get worse as the season progressed, which is surprising given how many coaches were fired mid-season. 

Berkelium97 (10):  A depressing cap to a grim season.  Can a new coach fix that putrid offense this offseason?

Last week: 11

Christopher_h (11): Arizona did a good job moving the ball in the first half, ultimately struggling to finish drives in the redzone—that is, settling for three FGs compared to two TDs for ASU. In the second half, it was a holding call on a punt out of the endzone for a safety, a pick-6 on a poor read from QB Will Plummer, and a terrible call by the refs to make an offensive facemask penalty out of a completely clean stiff arm. WR Dorian Singer was ejected in the third quarter for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty off-camera, and that was the end of Arizona scoring. QB Will Plummer threw all over ASU, but it ultimately didn’t matter due to the aforementioned redzone struggles in the first and second halves. 

Berkelium97 (11):  How typical of Arizona’s season to outscore the opponent, dominate the time of possession, and still somehow lose by three TDs.  The Wildcats have only been outgained by 177 yards this season but they’ve been outscored by 171—yes, you read that correctly.  I guess an abysmal -17 turnover margin (last in the nation and second-to-last is only -13) and an incredible 97.4% defensive red zone scoring (76.3% TDs—both bottom-three in the nation) really took a toll on the Wildcats.  Speaking of which, Arizona was -2 in turnover margin on Saturday and surrendered TDs on all three of ASU’s red zone possessions.

Last week: 12

Christopher_h (12): I can no longer deny, after a couple of early wins (including Oregon, no less), that Stanford is the worst team in the conference. #6 Notre Dame only managed to beat them by 30, the same margin of Cal’s victory. Therefore, Cal has just as much of a right to the playoffs as Notre Dame (who we'll see next year, by the way). 

Berkelium97 (12):  Time to bulldoze the campus, salt the earth, and start over.

---

The data

California is seventh despite getting humiliated by one of our rivals to ensure we would be blocked from a bowl? Let’s check out the homers as we reveal the individual ballots (Table 1).

Table 1. You know it’s a demoralizing game when only six writers show up—so much of Twist’s bacon-wrapped shrimp went to waste…

Compiling these individual votes is how we finalize the conference rankings.

Our rankings over the entire season have been graphed in Figure 1.

Really, I only have myself to blame. For the briefest of moments, I entertained the novelty of maintaining the top-and-bottom divide of the conference—a balance that would likely be shattered as consequence of an upset victory by a bottom-half team. And so, the cruel hand of fate rewarded this transient rumination by ensuring the split would continue with an unfathomable, inconceivable, and demoralizing destruction of the Golden Bears—the best of the bottom—by the baby Bruins from the south. Figure 1 shows a continuation of this conference divide for seven weeks strong, but what did it cost?

Figure 1. The monkey paw curled to maintain this beautiful pattern, curling every finger into a fist and beating up any positivity in the Cal fanbase.

Perhaps correlated with the conference settling into good and bad sides is the settling of Pac-12 schools into their tiers in our rankings, which would mean teams are moving up or down the rankings too much. We quantify this vertical movement and call it the Madness; Table 2 shows that the second half of the season has indeed had lower Total Madness each week and this week was the least Mad of the season.

Table 2. The Madness and how much the Pac-12 teams are changing spots each week.

Figure 2 graphs the total Madness that each team has scored over the season. The Beavs are in the danger zone and just one Madness score away from tying the Lobsterbacks are our Maddest team of the year. Stanfurd can extend this lead by getting out of the basement (sorry, Arizona) or Oregon State can nab the title with a crazy bowl performance—win or lose. Arizona likely has an insurmountable lead for the title of Least Mad team and would have to spontaneously jump eight spots in our rankings—with Oregon holding steady at second place—to relinquish said title.

Figure 2. Each team’s cumulative Madness score as it grows weekly.

Taking the mathematical averages of our responses for each team actually reveals a little more information that we left behind the curtain. If we take a look at the precise numerical values that were computed in that averaging, then we can learn more about how we as a dysfunctional group actually assessed the Pac-12 teams. Those precise scores for the post–Week 13 games is shown as columns in Figure 3; the size of the error bars tell you how incredibly different our responses for that team were.

I’m half-joking about there being homers in this group of voters when it comes to Cal and Figure 3 helps absolve us of our fandom. Though Cal was our seventh-ranked team, the precise scores reveal they were just a hair better than USC and Colorado. (Y’all are still a little homer-y, though.)

Figure 3. The precise scores to close regular-season play for (most of) the Pac-12.

The precise scores for the 2021 season are graphed in Figure 4. Though he submitted his votes very early in the process with no idea how the majority of the group was voting, Bk97 demonstrated his sage-like wisdom with his prescient prediction. He broke down the conference tiers as:

• Contenders: Utah, Oregon

• Should-have-beens: ASU, UCLA, WSU, OSU

• Frustrated teams that can still win occasionally: Cal, Colorado

• Please-let-the-season-be-over teams: Washington, Arizona, USC, LSJU

He was nearly spot-on with the exception of USC. Either we gave them credit for their raw talent advantage or we predicted the unpredictable Lincoln Riley hire. It would not have taken much to foresee that they would be smarmy assholes about it, though.

I suppose one thing we can take solace in this week is watching Stanfurd continue to cement themselves deeper and deeper in the basement in these precise votes.

Figure 4. I almost forgot this caption. You know what it is.

And now it’s time for a little break from the Power Rankings. Though the conference championship is up ahead—and the more important California–USC game as our last chance to beat them before Riley turns them into a juggernaut—there isn’t much reason to redo our whole rankings with just a third of the conference participating.

We will be back at the end of bowl season for the Pac-12.

And then… it will be the end.