Ranking College Football Programs - 1970-2021
An update to my traditional analysis with a new feature
As regular readers will recall, I periodically like to create a ranking of college football programs. The tl;dr of how and why is that I look back at the modern era of college football, which I define as starting in about 1970, and I consider margin of victory as opposed to simply win-loss record. See here and here for more information about my methodology and the logic behind it.
Building on my work recently of a discount-based model of ranking college football programs using strictly winning percentage, I have incorporated a discount factor into this version of the analysis. Basically a discount factor means a margin of victory counts less and less the farther and farther back in time it came. For example, if Nebraska beats Kansas by 31 points in 1975 and does the in 2015, the more recent 31-point victory counts more in the standings. Thus the Points For and Points Against that are used to calculate Margin of Victory get adjusted away over time depending on the discount factor used. Some samples of the rankings follow, but look at the workbook yourself for more details.
Since 1970; minimum 400 games played; no discount factor:
Since 1970; minimum 400 games played; 4% annual discount factor*:
Since 1970; no minimum number of games; no discount factor:
Since 1970; no minimum number of games; 4% discount factor:
How much you win by on average is my go-to measure of how good you have been. Here I have added the logic of also saying how much you’ve won by recently should matter more than how much you won by in the past. Including teams that have not played at the highest levels for long (and incidentally do not play still the highest levels of competition) is not in my estimation the best way to construct these rankings; hence, I like the minimum number of games played option. But there are a lot of things I want (in college football and elsewhere), and you can’t always get what you want. So I try to give what people might think they need in these lists. Enjoy!
*A 4% annual discount factor basically would mean that points and thus margin of victory is diminished at a rate that about every 18 years it is cut in half. E.g., a 31-point victory in 2004 is equal to about a 15-point victory in 2021. The logic of using 4% might be that it cuts MoV value in half each generation.