I've been interested in ranking College Football ever since the inception of the BCS; I've always felt that the sports writers and reporters are too influenced by "hype" and not watching what happens on the field to decide on the rankings. I've employed a similar system for CFL (Canadian Football League) football for years, where there is the luxury of every team playing every other team to determine ranking. Of course, in Div 1A football the season would have to be 119 games to achieve that degree of comparison.
So, I've employed the CFL ranking method to College football to rank the teams using an arbitrary numerical score called the "R-Score" (for "Ralph's Score"). The idea of this score is to rank the teams according to what they have shown on the field, not influenced by media hype. It rewards high scoring, wide margins of victory, lots of winning, and strong preventive defenses. It penalizes teams who win close games, who lost by large margins, and ranked teams who lose to unranked teams.
The system is far from perfect, and is tweaked from time to time. Last year's rankings are included for interest sake.
For anyone interested in ranking systems, there is a fascinating site run by K. Massey (one of the BCS gurus) that compares a number of amateur football ranking systems.
This is something we do for fun. Don't count on it to beat Vegas.
