Figuring Out Football Rankings: It's a Tough Game

Ranking college football teams is a tricky business. Even experts like Jeff Sagarin, who's been at it for decades, know there's no such thing as a perfect system. He learned this the hard way when he was a kid, trying to predict game outcomes based on points. He thought he had it all figured out until a grandmother in Brooklyn won a contest by picking teams based on their uniform colors. Talk about a reality check! Now, the College Football Playoff (CFP) is using a new metric that puts more weight on how tough a team's schedule is. But even with this change, debates are bound to happen. The CFP committee will release their first weekly rankings soon, and the final rankings in December will decide which 12 teams make the cut. Sagarin became famous in the 1980s when USA Today started publishing his football rankings. His rankings were used to help decide the national championship teams from 1998 to 2013. He still posts rankings on his website, and his work shows just how complex this stuff is. For example, he explains that schedule ratings are about figuring out what rating a hypothetical team would need to have a 50% chance of winning against the same schedule. The CFP has tweaked its schedule strength metric to reward teams that beat strong opponents and penalize those that lose to weaker ones. This change has even influenced conferences like the SEC and ACC to add an extra conference game next year. But not everyone thinks this new metric is foolproof. Rick Cleary, a math professor, points out that it favors teams from stronger conferences, like the SEC. There's also the issue of conference expansion, which has led to imbalanced schedules. Sheldon Jacobson, a sports analytics expert, notes that with only 12 or 13 games in a season, teams can avoid playing tough opponents. This leaves gaps in competition and raises questions about what might have happened if they had faced stronger teams. Right now, the top teams like Ohio State, Indiana, Texas A&M, and Alabama are likely to be in the mix for the top seeds. But their strength of schedule will be closely watched over the next month. Different sources rank these teams differently, showing that there's no one-size-fits-all answer. In the end, analytics are just tools. How the committee uses them is subjective. Sagarin believes that good human judgment is key, but people will always gravitate towards the data they like best. So, while rankings might not be perfect, they're the best we've got for now.