The creator of the Fremeau Efficiency Index is a colleague of mine here at the University of Notre Dame by the name of Brian Fremeau. Brian has been doing this statistical analysis work on football for a number of years --- really smart stuff.
And, his latest FEI rankings has the Fighting Irish ranked #2 in the country behind Clemson!
The Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) is a college football rating system based on opponent-adjusted drive efficiency. Approximately 20,000 possessions are contested annually in FBS vs. FBS games. First-half clock-kills and end-of-game garbage drives and scores are filtered out. Unadjusted game efficiency (GE) is a measure of net success on non-garbage possessions, and opponent adjustments are calculated with special emphasis placed on quality performances against good teams, win or lose. Other definitions:
- SOS: Strength of Schedule, measured as the likelihood of an elite team going undefeated against the given team's regular season schedule. Schedule strength data based on FEI ratings and calculated across other dimensions can be explored in this interactive visualization.
- FBS MW: Mean Wins, the average number of games a team with the given FEI rating would be expected to win against its regular season schedule of FBS opponents.
- FBS RMW: Remaining Mean Wins, the average number of games a team with the given FEI rating would be expected to win against the remainder of its regular season schedule of FBS opponents.
- OFEI: Opponent-adjusted Offensive Efficiency value generated per possession.
- DFEI: Opponent-adjusted Defensive Efficiency value generated per opponent possession.
- STE: Special Teams Efficiency value generated per game possession.
- FVE: Field Value Efficiency value generated per game possession.
LINK: FEI RANKING -- ALL 128 FBS TEAMS