This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/doggo816 on 2025-08-09 01:07:43+00:00.

The rankings (power 4 only)

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…/edit?usp=sharing

2 things

addressing 2 things I know will be controversial:

  1. Oregon scoring better than Indiana is an obvious flaw. In the timeframe I account for, Oregon’s 13-1 record beats out a 13-2 season in 2014, five more 12-win seasons, and eight more 10 or 11-win seasons. Indiana’s 11-2 record is in its own galaxy among the last 25 Hoosier seasons, its closest competitors being a 6-2 covid special and 8-5 in 2019. But they both count as the best record for their programs in the last 25 years; and because Oregon made it a round further in the CFP, they have the narrow edge.
  2. national champs Ohio State rank 10th. Yes it seems low, but the “postseason bonus” category is already giving a huge reward for winning it all - this just shows how consistently great OSU has been.
  3. (edit) Michigan is also too low because there’s no “beat Alabama” category, accounting for rivalries is too complicated beyond the biggest few games, and there’s no account for the residual emotion of winning it all the season before.

Intro

One thing that fascinates me about sports is how results are 100% objective, but the way we feel about them as fans is actually super subjective. Case in point: both Arizona State and Georgia were knocked out in the CFP quarterfinals . . . but one fanbase feels a LOT better about that than the other. So here, I’m trying to quantify how “special”, or notable, every team’s 2024 season should have felt by comparing it to their previous seasons.

I had fun doing the NFL edition of this. CFB is more difficult because the format of the sport is more complicated than the NFL, but I’m okay with how this came out.

Methodology

I went through and found where each team’s 2024 record ranks relative to their records in the last 5, 10, and 25 seasons. If it was the best, they got 1 for that category. If it was the worst, they got 5, or 10, or 25.

Note that this method weights up more recent seasons and weights down less recent seasons, because the more recent ones are fresher in mind, and therefore have more impact on how last season probably felt.

I multiplied those ranks to a common denominator of 100 and divided by 3, which is the “record weighted” column. Then I applied a multiplier based on what the team did in the postseason. National champs Ohio State got their score reduced by 25%, Notre Dame’s score stayed the same, everyone else’s increased by some factor.

For playoff teams I had the mutlipliers decrease at a faster rate as teams advanced further to reflect the higher stakes of later games. For all other teams, I gave bowl winners a multiplier 1.7, and bowl losers 1.75 (much smaller gap than the playoff games, to reflect the lower stakes of regular bowl games). Everyone that didn’t make a bowl game got their score doubled.