College Football Rankings - Now Updated Daily

Over the past few weeks, I had taken several stabs at creating a betting market power ranking for College Football.  Now that I've got the methodology ironed out and the code automated, I'm launching a daily version of the rankings.  These will update every morning with the latest lines and over/unders.  The format is very similar to the format I've established for my NFL rankings.

Here is an overview of the table (you can also hover over the column headings in the table for a brief description):

Overview

• Lstwk - The team's ranking as of the prior week
• GPF - Stands for Generic Points Favored.  It is what you would expect the team to be favored by against and average Division 1A opponent on a neutral field.
• oGPF - Stands for Offensive Generic Points Favored.  The component of a team's GPF that is attributable to offense (I derived this by combining the point spread with the over/under).
• dGPF - Stands for Defensive Generic Points Favored.  The component of a team's GPF that is attributable to defense.
• W-L - The team's season-to-date win/loss record.
• Conf - The team's conference and its GPF rank within that conference.
• BCS & AP - The latest BCS and AP Poll ranking for each team.
• Projected Wins - Projected regular season wins (conference championship games and bowl games excluded).  I simulate* the remainder of the season 2500 times and summarize the results for each team.  Mouse over each bar graph for details.
• SOS - Strength of Schedule ranking, both for games already played (the "Past" column) and for games remaining on the schedule (the "Future" column).  Each column shows the average GPF of the team's past(future) opponents and the difficulty ranking of that schedule.

Undefeated Watch

Excluding any conference championship games, as of October 28, Alabama had a 65% chance of going 12-0.  Oregon has a 51% chance of going 12-0.  Kansas State has a 32% chance of going 12-0.  Notre Dame  has a 26% of going 12-0.  Ohio State has a 32% chance.  And Louisville has a 16% chance of going 12-0.

* Note on the simulation of projected wins

Each game is simulated by converting the point spread into a win probability according to the following formula:

• win probability = 1 / (1 + exp(-(points favored)/8))

The factor of 8 was chosen to maximize the log-likelihood of NCAA Football results over the past four seasons.  For future games where the point spread has not been released, I use my latest GPF rankings to project the expected point spread.