Power ranking I feel fine about. Yeah it's weird to see OU lose to Iowa State (at home!) an only drop a bit, but meh. Model lines continue to correlated well with vegas lines and continue to do a tiny (inside the vig) bit better job predicting outcomes. Although I'm overdue for an new analysis on that topic.
Achievement is a more bit interesting and subject to intuition. Especially its behavior at the margins, both in terms of terrible teams and in terms of game outcomes.
Some examples..
Miami (Fl). If you exclude their opener against Bethune Cookman their rank 3rd in achievement. But they "only" beat Bethune Cookman by 28, and Bethune Cookman is fairly bad. Bethune-Cookman lost to FAU 45-0, for example. If Uconn (who are themselves terrible) and Bethune-Cookman played I'd have Uconn as a 28 point favorite. But that said, maybe Miami eased up, or used it as somewhat of a warm-up game, etc. How much that game should factor into their achievement rating is an interesting question, at least for me.
WSU vs. UW. I have UW at 6 and WSU at 16. The reason is basically WSU's games against Montana State and Boise State
WSU has two games with a rating < 0.900. Montana State (won by 31, 0.719) and Boise State (won by 3, 0.641)
UW has one such game. @Rutgers (won by 16, 0.823).
The achievement model considers the other games to be roughly on par. i.e. blowing out cal / colorado is rated similarly to a close with over USC at home or a 3 TD win over Oregon on the road. I'm not exactly saying that's the right path or w/e. Maybe achievement should be more focused on wins than margin of victory, I dunno.
But to dive a little deeper. UW beat Cal by 31. If they played today Bama would be a 28 point favorite over Cal at home. So UW did slightly better than Bama would be expected to do. So UW's rating for that game is slightly higher than Bama's current power rating.
WSU beat USC by 3. If they played today Bama would be favored by 12 over USC (per the model) so WSU did worse than Bama would be expected to do. Consequently, WSU gets a lower achievement rating for beating USC by 3 than UW did for beating Cal by 31.
Following? Not following at all? If yes, where am I going awry?