Archive for the 'Simple Rating System' Category

Whenever a team wins a championship, the temptation is always to compare them to other champions from the past, and the 2010 Auburn Tigers are no exception. Using the Simple Rating System (SRS), let’s take a look at where the newest title-holders stand among BCS champs…

On Monday, ESPN asked its users to rank the BCS Champions from #1-13, coming up with this list:

The SRS, though, comes up with a different ranking:

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Today, it’s time to finish our list of the top 20 college football programs of the modern era. As a quick refresher, I defined the “modern era” as 1946-present, because 1946 was the first true postwar season and the year before (1945) was the final time a service academy would win a National Championship. Also, the rankings are determined by the Simple Rating System (SRS), which measures team points per game differential relative to the NCAA average, adjusted for strength of schedule. Here’s a recap of the rankings so far:

20. Georgia Tech (+7.70)
19. Michigan State (+8.69)
18. Arkansas (+8.95)
17. Auburn (+9.59)
16. Miami (+10.00)
15. UCLA (+10.04)
14. Georgia (+10.42)
13. LSU (+10.52
12. Florida State (+10.97)
11. Tennessee (+11.89)

With that in mind, let’s move on to the Top 10, which (just as alert reader JW Lewis predicted) features “three teams from the current Big 10, two from the SEC, three from the current Big 12 (with one of those being from the old SWC and two from the old Big 8), one from the Pac-10, and one independent”:

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To kick off our College Football Blog coverage here at Sports-Reference.com/CFB, I thought I’d jump right in with a countdown of the twenty best programs of the modern era. Of course, in order to do that, I first need to define “best” and “modern era”.

For “best”, I’m going to go with the tried-and-true Simple Rating System (SRS), a staple of the Sports-Reference sites ever since Doug posted about it on May 8, 2006. It’s certainly not the final word in team ratings, but it does a good job of balancing simplicity with predictive accuracy — and when all you have going back to the 1940s is game scores, it’s hard to find a better way to rank schools.

By the way, a few notes about the SRS you see here… Because college football features teams of widely varying skill levels and schedule strengths, we had to find a way to avoid rewarding teams for running up the score on an overmatched opponent, which is why wins of more than twenty-four points count as +24. Also, we needed to make sure wins (even close ones) were properly weighted relative to losses, which is why wins of fewer than seven points still count as +7.

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