sports

We updated our rankings of the 136 FBS football teams through the end of the 2025-26 season. Unfortunately, the bowl games are not as competitive as they used to be, as many of the best players sit out those games to avoid getting injured before the NFL draft. Nevertheless, we considered the results of all bowl games. They are very helpful for our model to compare teams across conferences, as there are relatively few regular season games between the best…

Following up on our post on a new approach to ranking college football teams, which we applied to the Big Ten conference, this post expands that approach to all 136 FBS teams, ranking those teams through the conference championship games. We considered only games played between FBS teams. There were 126 FBS vs. FCS games in 2025 and the FCS teams won only four. Certainly, the four FBS teams that lost those games (Army, Eastern Michigan, Massachusetts, and Middle Tennessee…

Dozens of organizations and individuals produce computer-based college football rankings. Kenneth Massey’s page displays rankings for many of these models, in addition to traditional poll-based rankings. The approaches taken in the computer models vary widely in how they address the following issues: (1) margin of victory; (2) strength of schedule; (3) game location; (4) game timing in the season; and (5) adjustments for statistics other than game score, such as points per drive, yards per game, yards per play,  turnovers…