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David Mease's Football Rankings


Below are my ranks for all 120 Division 1-A teams based on all games played through Saturday, November 15, 2008.  The ranks were produced using a penalized maximum likelihood model I have developed which is described in a paper I recently wrote.  The model uses ONLY wins and losses as its input and ignores margin of victory, location of the game, conference affiliation, date of the game, etc.  Moreover, the model does not use any prior information such as pre-season rankings. Despite its simplicity, the rankings produced have agreed more strongly on average with the AP and Coaches polls than all 10 computer models that have been used in the BCS, as discussed in my paper.

Click here to download my paper, updated July of 2003.  The paper was published in the November 2003 issue of The American Statistician.

Click here to view the SAS code or R code which ranks teams using my model.


Special thanks to Derek, Vijay, and Earl for all the help they have given me with this project and to Kenneth Massey for including my rankings on his comparison page.

 

 

Rank

Team

Rating

Wins

Losses

1

Texas Tech

1.5876

10

0

2

Texas

1.4980

10

1

3

Alabama

1.4916

11

0

4

Utah

1.4171

11

0

5

Florida

1.2559

9

1

6

Oklahoma

1.2435

9

1

7

Boise St.

1.1932

10

0

8

USC

1.1400

9

1

9

Georgia

1.0945

9

2

10

Penn St.

1.0490

10

1

11

Ball St.

0.9994

10

0

12

Ohio St.

0.9983

9

2

13

Oklahoma St.

0.9618

9

2

14

Missouri

0.9245

9

2

15

Brigham Young

0.8907

10

1

16

TCU

0.8726

9

2

17

Michigan St.

0.8546

9

2

18

Cincinnati

0.7239

8

2

19

North Carolina

0.6486

7

3

20

Oregon St.

0.6323

7

3

21

Pittsburgh

0.6193

7

2

22

Miami, Fla.

0.5953

7

3

23

LSU

0.5772

7

3

24

Nebraska

0.5415

7

4

25

Central Michigan

0.5376

8

2

26

Western Michigan

0.5303

9

2

27

Oregon

0.5266

8

3

28

Florida St.

0.4793

7

3

29

Air Force

0.4610

8

3

30

Boston College

0.4470

7

3

31

Georgia Tech

0.4415

7

3

32

South Carolina

0.4388

7

4

33

Northwestern

0.4303

8

3

34

Connecticut

0.4223

7

3

35

Maryland

0.4210

7

3

36

California

0.4094

6

4

37

Virginia Tech

0.3814

6

4

38

Wake Forest

0.3690

6

4

39

Mississippi

0.3636

6

4

40

Vanderbilt

0.3592

6

4

41

Iowa

0.3530

7

4

42

Tulsa

0.3049

8

2

43

Rice

0.2733

7

3

44

West Virginia

0.2695

6

3

45

Notre Dame

0.2388

6

4

46

Virginia

0.2360

5

5

47

Wisconsin

0.2262

6

5

48

Navy

0.2253

6

4

49

Kansas

0.2225

6

5

50

Minnesota

0.1857

7

4

51

Kentucky

0.1713

6

5

52

Buffalo

0.1590

6

4

53

Rutgers

0.1002

5

5

54

South Florida

0.0944