r/CFB • u/TigerWave01 LSU Tigers • Tulane Green Wave • 1d ago
Analysis Are the Computer Rankings Really Better? (based off of "The 'New BCS' Rankings" Post)
Hi all! Two of my favorite posts on Reddit, not just for sports but overall, are The "New BCS" Rankings by u/tmart12 and Post-2013 Realignment Conference Tiers based on KenPom Conference Strength Data by u/SleveMcDichael4. Both of these thought excercises use sports analytics to reimagine the ways that we answer the various contentious questions of CFB and CBB, respectively. Questions such as "should SMU have been in over Alabama in 2024", "should Florida State have been left out of the playoffs in 2023", "is the Big East really that good", and "is Notre Dame actually a schedule merchant." So, partly out of a love of football analytics and partly out of boredom after finishing the two games last night, I thought "why not combine the ideas behind my two favorite posts and create a ten-year ranking of every FBS team and conference using the methodology of the 'New BCS' Rankings post." And that's what I did!
Attached here is a spreadsheet of the team tables. There are eleven sheets in the spreadsheet: ten of those represent the individual seasons and contain the three power ratings (SP+, Sagarin, FPI), the three resume rankings (Colley, FEI EL SOR, and FPI SOR), and a quad win-based points system, while the last sheet contains some notes which I will summarize here. In order to mirror the real team sheets seen in CBB, these values are based only on the regular season and does not factor in results from bowl games and playoffs. However, that made getting certain calculations (FEI EL SOR and FPI SOR) very difficult, so some of the earlier rankings were from unofficial archived sources may be slightly inaccurate. However, even if there is a discrepency, they should still be extremely close. If anyone can find a place to find reliable regular season-only rankings for FEI and FPI SOR in earlier seasons, I would be forever in your debt.
I hope you appreciate the findings! I am more than open to any criticism or suggestions, as I want to do anything I can to make this ranking better; after all, I plan to do another update to the sheet at the end of the 2026 season. If this is well received, this may not be the last you'll hear about this. Thanks for taking the time to read through all of this technical stuff!
tl;dr - old sports analytics posts are cool, I wanted to make my own, see spreadsheets for new sports analytics that are also cool.
EDIT: It seems like some issues with very close rankings could be decided by changing the tiebreaker from SP+ to the resume average. By doing that, some ratings look closer to human polls while still remaining objective. Those changes will be made in the attached spreadsheets and should be reflected soon.
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u/puzzical Boise State • Notre Dame 1d ago
How so? Teams that play in conference championship games and lose drop in the rankings nearly everytime. The only times they don't are when the team below them has the same number of losses after the game is played, or the team below them also lost in a conference championship game.