This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/jimbobbypaul on 2023-08-25 19:59:50.
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:
Substack:
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)
Graphs
Thank you to none other than my dad for making these graphs! Thanks dad! He learned how to use a Reddit python library, do data scraping, use matplotlib, and anything else required to make these.
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
Top 50 seasons adjusted for games played
Top 50 Group of 5 seasons by raw score
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/…
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