A British Perspective on College Football Rankings
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I am the last user on this site to speak to about College Football. I know absolutely nothing about it. I know of the Big 10, Pac something or other, and one day, the College Elite play in the NFL. But that's about it.
What I have noticed, is that there is no definite way of finding out who is the champion. It tends to be opinion polls. Which I agree, is a bit naff.
It is a problem I can relate to. At my school, we were faced with the task of ranking everybody in my school chess team, in order so that we could seed them in order to play our heat of the UK Chess Challenge. In short, we needed a reliable ranking system, with credibility worldwide, so that we could calculate who the best players were. I think you can adopt the same system with College Football.
The English Chess Federation uses a rating system that fulfils such criteria. I have used it, with a few moderations to calculate the "grades" of every player that has played chess in the school, and the results are a fair indication of the strength of each player.
At the start of the season, each team will have a grade of 100. In the ECF system, if you win, you score your opponents grade + 50 (so in Week 1, it would be 150), a draw is your opponents grade (which would be 100), and a loss would be your opponents grade - 50 (in week one is 50).
This can be tweaked however to reflect strength of victory. In effect, a constant can be introduced, say "k", and k is a rating out of 10 depending on how strong the victory is. Say, a 50 point win can make k=10, or a 1 point win can make k=1. Either way, a constant can be introduced so that the grade changes for a win and a loss, such that the new scores would be opponents grade + 5k for a win, opponents grade for a draw, and opponents grade - 5k for a loss.
So after Week 1, you will have a table with all College Football teams in the country jumbled up with a grade. Currently (I assume) that a College will play just other teams in their division. That is still fine, but now they would need to play teams from elsewhere to try to claim the division. The easiest way would be to turn the system into a Swiss.
A Swiss is used to find the best players in chess tournaments by pitting people near to, or as near to as possible the same score against one another. So you never get a rubbish team against a good one, etc. This is where modern College Football deviates, in that you can have winning teams against losing ones. This doesn't help, because you then will have an easy 50 point win. There is a rule though, that a win against someone graded 40 below you or more scores you your own grade + 4k, rather than their grade + 5k. So if your grade is 125, and you play someone graded 80, you score 165 for a thrashing. Yet if you play someone on 125 and narrowly win, your rating won't change that much. The Swiss part of the plan is therefore very important.
Chess has the luxury of being able to use many games to calculate the winner, because the ECF calculates grades every year, based on sometimes as many as 30 games played. I base mine on a minimum of 7 before changing the ratings. The fact that the ratings would have to be updated every week is a small issue (without taking it through testing, which I can't, because of the current College Football system).
Anyway, in Week 2, more games will be played, with scores going the same way as before. The drawing of games would mean that Team 1 in the rankings plays Team 2 in the rankings, Team 3 plays Team 4 etc. This happens in subsequent rounds, unless teams have already played. In which case, they play the next lowest team they haven't played.
Another aspect of the Swiss in chess, is that as far as possible, players should play with each colour equal times. This is impossible sometimes (odd number of games), but generally it can be kept to easily. The equivalent problem in College Football would be home and away. This is done most easily by alternating home and away each week, which is good for fans.
After 10 weeks of football (I don't know how long the season is in terms of number of games, but let's say 10), the season will be over. The rankings will be calculated, and there will be a clear order of the top teams in the country. In the extremely unlikely event of a tie, then there can be a playoff for Number 1 the following week. I don't know if there's a College equivalent of the Super Bowl, but if you wanted one, the top 2 teams in the system could play one another. If you wanted playoffs, you can select any number you like from the ranking list to play in them.
- Pros - Easy ranking system, ranks each team nationwide, close matches every week due to Swiss format, tried and tested system, statistically reliable Number 1, adds incentive to play in dead games to increase "k" (which boosts your rating), gives teams with losing records something to play for
- Cons - Takes away from divisional play, won't know about games until about 6 days beforehand (televising may be difficult), difficult for casual fan to follow
So, that is my attempt at solving the seemingly universal problem that is College Football. I think it would work with the NFL to test, something I shall get around to shortly. But I think this system would work. Let me know any thoughts you have on the matter.
Like I say, it works at school, click here if you want to see the results of that test. We now use it for important things at school.
