Personal Football Computer Rankings

By: KingJames

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on October 30, 2023, 12:40 PM | 11 comments

Years ago I started doing computer rankings (2000s time frame). The premise is pretty basic in that it rewards wins based on the opponents record, and punishes losses based on the opponents record (e.g. if you beat a 7-1 team then you get a lot of points while losing to a 1-7 team really hurts). It is recursive to take into account the opponents score once initially calculated.

There are some other basic things like home field advantage is factored in, score matters but has diminishing returns, as well as everyone is penalized for playing a 1AA team (never updated to code for FCS).

For many years this pegged the CFB CG and got the winner correct. Once it went to 4 teams it hasn't been as correct, but i still look at it to gleam some interesting things that it shows, especially early in the season where things aren't as linked.

Note: score is normalized to be 0-100 the only real use here is to show the difference between spots (Mich is closer to anOSU than Texas is to Mich)

Rank	Team	Wins	Loss	Score
1	Ohio State	8	0	100
2	Michigan	8	0	99.09
3	Texas	7	1	97.39
4	Florida St	8	0	95.16
5	Oklahoma	7	1	94.3
6	Alabama	7	1	93.54
7	Washington	8	0	88.38
8	James Madison	8	0	87.62
9	Liberty	8	0	83.08
10	Louisville	7	1	82.71
11	Penn State	7	1	82.66
12	Mississippi	7	1	82.14
13	Notre Dame	7	2	81.14
14	Troy	6	2	80.41
15	Oregon	7	1	78.89
16	Lsu	6	2	78.42
17	Missouri	7	1	78.05
18	Georgia	8	0	77.89
19	Kansas St	6	2	77.2
20	Kansas	6	2	76.21
21	Utah	6	2	76.06
22	Air Force	8	0	75.53
23	Oklahoma St	6	2	73.85
24	Southern Cal	7	2	73.06
25	Georgia Southern	6	2	72.96

What i find most interesting is UGA hasn't played any one good, they are 18th right now which is insane. And just for note VT is 60th which is behind TCU, BGU, Auburn, and NW as the best 4-4 teams. Clemson is 61.

Some big outliers are also UCLA at 40, and UNC at 46.

Using the same rankings for conferences which gets a bit odd since ACC has winning records against everyone but the Big 12 (0-2) yet are the worst conference. The Big Ten has losing records against the ACC and PAC 12 but is ranked better due to teams like anOSU, Mich, PSU, Wisconsin, and Iowa winning OOC games and being ranked well

The mean is straight up mean while weighted gives more weight to the middle of the conferences. So if mean > weighted then the conference is top heavy, if weighted > mean then the middle of the pack is better. The Pac 12 is showing they have a deep conference and the middle Pac12 team is better than the middle SEC team.

Conference	Mean	Weighted
Big 10 Conference	64.74	63.04
Southeastern Conference	61.20	61.10
Pacific 12 Conference	61.15	61.33
Big 12 Conference	61.05	59.18
Atlantic Coast Conference	58.41	57.18
Sun Belt Conference	52.54	52.13
Mountain West Conference	45.34	45.33
American Athletic Conference	42.85	42.31
Independents	42.40	38.58
Conference USA	41.18	38.76
Mid-American Conference	37.10	36.55