Ranking the Top 131 College Football Programs of the Last 40 Years: In Review
A trip down memory lane of the 131 days we spent together.
Main hub thread with the full 131 rankings
Thank You
Like I said yesterday, what a ride it’s been. Thanks everyone for all the nice comments on #1 Alabama yesterday and for the continued support throughout the 131 days. It was every bit as hard as it looked, as I had many sleepless nights writing these to try and get them out by the next day. Worth it though!!
So, why’d I do it? Why spend 700 hours of my free time for little financial gain and no public glory? It was just something I wanted to do out of principle. With all the shock jock and clickbait content out there, I wanted to create something thought-provoking about the recent history of college football, one that was (hopefully) as unbiased as possible and educated people (including myself). It acted as a way to spur discussion about the best programs, individal teams, coaches, in a way that required you to back up your argument with numbers.
I hope you enjoyed, whether it was from the 1-131 ranking reveals, reading the write-ups, discussing the best individual teams/programs in the comments, seeing the worst team for a program, seeing the best team for a program, discussing the top 50 teams since 1983, something else, or all the above.
Another shameless plug, I apologize but I did get permission from the mods…
If you enjoyed these posts and/or the effort put into them, and feel like helping out a young guy, I have a buymeacoffee donation link if you feel like making my day. There’s also my substack if you want to keep updated on the publishing/release of a coffee table book covering the last 50 years.
Donations: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/x86sports
Substack: https://x86sports.substack.com
The Algorithm(s) and Process
Long ago, I made my algorithm for ranking teams in a season. It’s nothing special—I won’t be releasing all the details, but a general idea is that you get points for a win and lose points for a loss. Scheduling tough is rewarded: If you beat a good opponent, you gain a lot of points. If you lose to a good opponent, you lose only a few points. If you beat a bad opponent, you gain only a few points. If you lose to a bad opponent, you lose a lot of points. Scoring differential is also factored in, and I divided by log(n+1) to account for the disparity in number of games played. Again, nothing special, but it’s been very close to the actual AP Poll results. …and I think it’s pretty damn good. That’s what I used to generate scores for each team from every season from 1983-2022.
For the actual 1-131 ranking of programs of the last 40 years, I kept it simple. More simple than people might’ve thought. I added 20 to every team’s season scores (there were so many seasons with negative scores, I wanted to make more of them positive), then multiplied their best season by 40, second best season by 39, etc.… second worst season by 2, and worst season by 1. Then added all the season scores together. For teams that played less than 40 seasons, their best season was multiplied by 40 and their worst ended up being multiplied by 40 - (number of seasons) + 1. For example, Boise State is 40*(66.333) + 39*(65.100) + … + 15*(-12.198) + 14*(-42.219) = 29980.
The research and writing is what took 99% of my time. After getting off work, I’d essentially do the same thing every day for 131 days:
Make the skeleton for the article with the section headers (takes 20 seconds to copy and paste it in)
Find a related image from Wikimedia Creative Commons and cite the source (3 minutes)
Generate ranking of the team’s FBS seasons over the last 40 years. Paste the table into article along with the overall team score (5 minutes)
Paste in team’s bullet points for W/L record, consensus All-Americans, bowl record, etc. (10 seconds, but compiling all this data took ~15 hours before the series started)
Pull up the following pages: The team’s CFB Reference page, Wikipedia NFL Draftees list, Wikipedia team history page, Wikipedia list of seasons (2 minutes)
Take notes on All-Americans and award winners for top 5 seasons and worst season, play around with my data to see if there’s any cool trends I can mention (20 minutes)
Write about worst season (40 minutes)
Write about top 5 seasons (3-5 hours)
Write 5th quarter questions (3 minutes)
Read article out loud and make edits (15 minutes)
Update remaining teams and list of top 50 seasons overall, convert plaintext Substack article to markdown for Reddit (10 minutes)
Stats and Graphs
Graphs:
American Athletic Team Rankings
Stats:
Team posts with the most upvotes:
Team name (#team rank) - number of upvotes
Alabama (#1) - 1731
Florida State (#3) - 1109
Ohio State (#2) - 1033
Michigan (#8) - 923
Nebraska (#9) - 903
Clemson (#10) - 893
Florida (#5) - 876
Oregon State (#69) - 825
Georgia (#7) - 817
Penn State (#12) - 801
Worst: FIU (#127) - 111
Team posts with the most comments:
Ohio State (#2) - 945
Florida State (#3) - 900
Nebraska (#9) - 864
Clemson (#10) - 794
Florida (#5) - 769
Michigan (#8) - 736
Oklahoma (#4) - 710
LSU (#13) - 667
Penn State (#12) - 630
Georgia (#7) - 627
Worst: South Alabama (#118) - 14
<Link to top 50 seasons comment>
<Link to top 50 Group of 5 seasons comment>
<Link to worst 50 seasons comment>
Commenter Shoutouts
I’d like to give a few shoutouts to a few commenters who I noticed posting often, with a lot of these guys doing so since the first few days of the series. With other 5000 unique commenters, there’s too many names to give a proper thanks, so don’t be offended if I missed you, I’ve read just about every comment (but haven’t had time to reply to many).
Special thanks to but not limited to u/amoss_303, u/runningwaffles19, u/MyMediocreName, u/DDub04, u/bretticus33, u/branden110, u/JarodBurford, u/marine_guy, u/ksuwildcat, u/angrysquirrel777, u/Tarlcabot18, u/cyberchaox, u/Additional-Cry8856, u/HHCougar, u/ashterberry, u/engineerbuilder, u/shadowszanddust, u/bloodmuffins793, u/rnilbog, u/judolphin, u/mathwrath55, Iowa State fans, Fresno State fans, and the 2-3 Bowling Green fans who’ve been here since the beginning.
Top 10 Commenters by # of comments:
u/amoss_303 - 307
u/runningwaffles19 - 236
u/DDub04 - 188
u/shadowszanddust - 158
u/smurf-vett - 141
u/bretticus33 - 139
u/ksuwildkat - 136
u/Statalyzer - 133
u/bloodmuffins793 - 121
u/cyberchaox - 118
Top 10 Commenters by # of posts commented on:
u/amoss_303 - 110
u/runningwaffles19 - 72
u/bretticus33 - 70
u/ksuwildkat - 70
u/DDub04 - 64
u/cyberchaox - 60
u/rnilbog - 54
u/HHCougar - 52
u/SharkMovies - 42
u/Tarlcabot18 - 40
u/UteFlyersCardJazz - 40
Top 10 Commenters by # of upvotes:
u/amoss_303 - 10757
u/IOWA_SUCKS - 6192
u/runningwaffles19 - 5340
u/galeforcewinds95 - 5297
u/DDub04 - 3362
u/shadowszanddust - 2716
u/UMeister - 2576
u/rnilbog - 2492
u/bretticus33 - 2386
u/mathwrath55 - 2278
Words of Wisdom
"My mom said something very early in my life that I'll never forget...if you have your health, you have everything. Everything else is fine. But she as a nurse for 2 years, saw people who grew up in chronic pain. She said honey, if you grow up, and at any point in your life you're in pain from the minute you wake to the minute you go to sleep, it will suffocate everything else in your life." - Colin Cowherd, 04/30/2018
I know some people have mixed feelings about Cowherd, but his statement is true here. Please treat others with kindness, as you never know what disability, ailment, etc. may be impacting them. If you know anyone with a disability or chronic condition in your life, please make time for them and make them feel included if you can. It can be hard enough dealing with a chronic condition—it can feel very isolating as well. You’d be surprised at how many people have a story to tell.
"The world thinks mathematicians are people for whom math is easy. That's wrong. Sure, some kids, like John Urschel (mathematician), have little trouble with school math. But everyone who starts down the road to creating really new mathematics finds out what Urschel did: It's a struggle. A prickly, sometimes lonely struggle whose rewards are uncertain and a long time coming. Mathematicians are the people who love that struggle." - Jordan Ellenberg
"Only being kind to yourself when you think you deserve it is like only watering a flower when it blooms. Kindness is what helps you flourish. You deserve it all the time and not just when you're at your best."
I just like these
Conclusion
Hopefully this inspired people to go out and do similar things. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever been the best at committing to and finishing things, so this was a major accomplishment for me. I’d love to see people play around with the data in the comments, I’ll try to compile my data into a spreadsheet for people to use as long as they give credit. Feel free to AMA in the comments, whether it be about additional data that wasn’t posted, about a book, about the process, etc.. There’s a decent chance I’ll do something else next offseason if there’s little to no realignment drama and I’m not being too spammy.
Thanks folks, and let’s have a hell of a 2023 season!!! FIGHT ON!
Shameless Plugs
Donations: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/x86sports
Substack: https://x86sports.substack.com
