Monday, November 26, 2007

College Football Computer Rankings

As a diehard fan of college football (especially my Ohio State Buckeyes) I have become fascinated by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) and its many flaws. At the same time however, I do think it is the best system that college football has had to date. Nevertheless, any system that ranks teams based on human opinion and mathematical formulas without letting them play it out on the field will inevitably lend itself to tremendous controversy. Therefore, I've developed my own "computer" rankings of all 120 Division 1-A (I refuse to use the phrase FBS) . The rankings are based on the following:

1) Win-Loss percentage - Simple team win-loss percentage

2) Strength of Schedule - The strength of schedule takes into account two separate parts. The first part, which is weighted more heavily, is your opponents win-loss record. The second part is your opponents-opponents win-loss record. This is done to reward teams whose competition doesn't appear as tough as they really are due to their own challenging schedule.

3) Recent Performance - The recent performance part of the formula takes into account a teams last 5 games and the quality of opponent in those games. This is meant to reward a team for playing great football and to address the question of who is the best team in the country right now... an argument used by many schools and fans to champion their team for a great bowl game.

Using these three components, I generated computer rankings. The rankings after 13 weeks of college football are as follows:

  1. West Virginia
  2. Missouri
  3. Ohio State
  4. Georgia
  5. Hawaii
  6. LSU
  7. Boston College
  8. Kansas
  9. Virginia Tech
  10. Florida
  11. Oklahoma
  12. USC
  13. Arizona State
  14. BYU
  15. Tennessee
  16. Illinois
  17. Clemson
  18. South Florida
  19. Oregon
  20. Texas
  21. Boise State
  22. Cincinnati
  23. Virginia
  24. Connecticut
  25. Wisconsin

I welcome your comments about this list. With the exception of Hawaii at #5, which I believe is too high for the Rainbow Warriors, I think these rankings are really accurate. Check back next week after the remaining regular season games as I reveal my final Top #25 prior to the bowl games. I'll also show conference rankings next week as well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, a new post! :) I thought this was dead. That's awesome that you put together a computer ranking. I've thought about doing this, too, just for fun. Where did you get the data? You didn't enter all of the schedules/results by hand, did you?

Kalber said...

Yeah, I've been meaning to write more, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I'm hopefully going to continue to make a post every week or so. I didn't enter the schedules by hand, I used the "helmet" schedules that someone else had put together. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way or website to enter the results automatically. Therefore, I have done it by hand, but it only takes at most a half hour per week. The hard part was setting the whole thing up. :)