Browse this week's slate
How the model works, and whether it does
See where every team stands, replay 2025
Who makes the twelve-team field
What we said, what happened, and where we split from the market
Your call against the projected margin
WHAT GOES INTO A RATING
Nobody votes on these ratings. A team opens the year on a projection built from last season, its recruiting class, its coaching situation and its portal haul, and from there the formula re-solves every week as results come in. Here is the whole thing, coefficients and all.
Step 2 only ever looks backward. The rating used in week 8 has seen weeks 1 through 7 and nothing else, so a result can never slip back and explain a game that happened before it. Solving all of those games at once is also why strength of schedule is not bolted on afterward: beating a good team lifts your number more than beating a bad one does. The knobs:
How much of last year carries over. The other 5% drifts back toward average, so nobody opens the year as a blank slate or a prisoner of last season.
Points added per standard deviation of recruiting talent. It is what keeps a blue blood ahead of a Group of 5 team Saturday has never watched play.
A new head coach pulls the preseason number toward his own track record (career SP+), so a team isn't stuck at the last regime's level. This is the term that sees an elite hire coming.
Net transfer haul, weighted by each player's grade and whether he can play right away, not by raw headcount. It is how a roster reload, a coach showing up with half his old team, registers before a snap.
A penalty for a team returning far less production than average, the way a contender gutted by NFL departures should fall. It only ever docks the extreme losers, never inflates the returners.
How hard results get tugged back toward the preseason number. A few games in, the preseason number still wins. By November the scoreboard has taken over and the preseason number has faded out.
The most any single game can move a rating, so a 70-point Saturday counts as a blowout, not a five-alarm fire.
Fit per venue, not one flat leaguewide number. A raucous home crowd is worth more than a quiet one, and the data says how much.