I get it. I really do. After nearly 20 years of that demonic system called the BCS, why use any kind of computer to rank college football teams? After all, did you not see the massive success that was the first College Football Playoffs? It seems that the "eye test" of those who know college football worked out as well as anyone could have hoped. And yet here I am, with my shiny new power rankings. That I used a computer formula to come up with.

Let me preface this by saying I can explain the formula pretty simply. Anyone who passed middle school math should be able to understand it. My initial inspiration came from a post a few weeks ago by WarRoomEagle, the one where he explained knockouts in college football. I would recommend reading his post before mine, and most of the disclaimers he provides carry over into my rankings.

Here is my general formula, which I have uncreatively called the Sterritt Score:

Sterritt Score=(Strength of Schedule)×√(〖Average Margin of Victory〗^2+〖Average Knockout Time〗^2 )

Let me break it down. My whole goal was to take WarRoomEagle’s knockout numbers and use them to see how much a team dominated its schedule. One of the worst case scenarios described for having the knockout as useful descriptive stat was the case of the 3-2 Auburn-Mississippi State debacle in 2008. If a team "knocks out" the other team by earning a higher score than the final score of the losing opponent, but is never more than a possession ahead of their opponent, is it really a knockout? By factoring in how much a team actually won by, I tried to address that concern. The Sterritt Score can be easily imagined visually by a plot:

Each team’s average margin of victory (MOV) is measured against its average knockout time (KO) in minutes. Simply put, the Sterritt Score formula measures the distance of the team’s point from average (0 pts, 0 minutes). I had a little trouble dealing with negatives (i.e., when you square a negative, it becomes positive), so I multiplied any team’s score that had a negative in either MOV or KO by negative one, and any team that had both negative MOV and KO by negative 2. This did not necessarily condemn teams that were negative in both factors, but it certainly made it less likely that they would be ranked higher than a team with only one negative factor.

So where does the team’s strength of schedule (SOS) factor in? Yes, my goal is to measure how much each team dominated the schedule they were given, but obviously no schedule is created equal. By multiplying in the SOS (taken as total win percent of a team’s opponents in FBS games), a team that dominated an easy schedule is penalized (looking at you Marshall) while a team that fought through a tough schedule, like Arkansas, is rewarded. Hopefully I have walked through my thought process with you enough for you to understand why each aspect of the formula was included. Initially, I included the team’s win percentage as a factor similar to the SOS in their score, but I decided it would be redundant, as it would already be reflected in both their MOV and KO time.

Without further ado, here are the 2014 NCAA Sterritt Score Rankings:

A few thoughts:

· TCU ranked first in both MOV and KO. They truly dominated their schedule. However, their score was brought down quite a bit by ranking 68th in SOS. Meanwhle, Oregon, Ohio State, Alabama, and Florida State ranked 4th, 5th, 8th, and 13th in SOS, respectively. It’s clear the Committee valued SOS over dominance.

· Speaking of FSU, they come in at 18th in the Sterritt Score. Why? They ranked 31st in MOV and 19th in KO. The lack of dominance everyone saw but could not quantify really bit FSU here.

· The team with the biggest rise in the rankings was Arkansas (11), a team that went 6-6. They ranked 22nd in MOV and 15th in KO. To me, this means they really underperformed as far as their final record goes. They blew out teams in their wins and when they lost, it was close. I think nobody herewould have wanted a rematch with Bielema’s squad later in the season, and it makes me think they are due for a big year in 2015 if they can plug in a few new guys on defense.

· Only one team had a positive MOV while maintaining a negative KO (Nevada). Meanwhile, 8 teams pulled off a positive KO and negative MOV (Akron, Ball State, Buffalo, Maryland, NC State, Northwestern, South Carolina, Texas).

· If the P5 conferences continue to try to fight for independence from the NCAA, what if the "other" conferences had their own playoff? The top 4 non-P5 teams were Marshall, Boise, Memphis, and La Tech. It’s certainly not the CFB Playoff, but you can’t tell me you wouldn’t check out the Mid-Major championship.

· Based on the average Sterritt Score by conference, the conference rankings come in as such:

1. SEC

2. Pac 12

3. ACC

4. Big 10

5. Big 12

6. MWC

7. CUSA

8. AAC

9. MAC

10. Sun Belt

· The MWC Mountain Division actually would have ranked 3rd in the conference rankings, thanks to four out of six teams being in the top 50 (Air Force, Boise, Colorado State, and Utah State).

· The SEC West was (obviously) the best conference in football, placing ALL SEVEN TEAMS in the Top 50. Auburn came in 5th in the division, in front of only LSU and Texas A&M, yet was still 26th in the country.

· I did my best to eliminate games played against FCS opponents. The MOV data used did not include said games. Any WINS against FCS opponents were not counted, though losses in such games were. Unfortunately, the I believe the KO data I used from WarRoomEagle counted FCS games. I could not find a source without them, and I’m not going to manually calculate that for every game of the 2014 season. If you have such data, please let me know.

That about sums it up. I really enjoyed this mini-project, and if I have time and feel like it I may go back and check out other seasons. I hope you enjoyed the read! My plan is to keep the rankings up to date during the 2015 season, so if this gets a good enough response, I’ll post the rankings each week.

War Eagle everyone!

PS: A ton of credit obviously goes to WarRoomEagle here. I would not have had the idea if not for your Knockout post. Also, my dad is the reason this got done. This probably would have taken me weeks to accomplish on Excel, but he was able to guide me in the right direction as far as efficiency goes.