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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/swdanley17 on 2025-06-04 17:21:02+00:00.
Tl; dr: My rating of the greatest college football programs (current P4 + ND, Oregon St, and Washington St - RIP the PAC-12) of all time (1869-2024). Each season is weighted equally and includes pre-AP Poll data. My rating is 45% AP Poll + 45% computer ratings (alternatively, it is 90% Billingsley Report for seasons Pre-1936, when the first AP Poll was released) + 10% National Championships (NC). Years where there was a split National Championship results in a partial NC (e.g. 1997 Michigan and Nebraska both get .5 NCs). In the chart, “NCs” represent the “raw” data (total # of adjusted NCs), while the other columns represent the % of success that school had in comparison to the highest rated school in that era. The Final Rating is the average of the 3 (Pre-1936, AP Poll Era, NCs), at the weights outlined above. Including pre-AP Poll data might alter our perception of “Blue Blood” status, if we let it!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i5QMzk1BwTaAimw7KdPwxcHILEr3_eiqlQ_QllZ40nM/edit?usp=sharing
My Ranking of the Best College Football Programs
Approximately 2 years ago, I “updated” the much beloved Blue Blood Chart (https://imgur.com/XOJOmEu) by incorporating National Championships as a “third axis.” Though, I specifically noted at the time that my post was not my attempt at ranking the best programs of all time. Here, however, is my shot at it.
Preliminary Opinions
Obviously, this has been done many many times. However, too often, “best college football programs of all time” posts/articles/etc. completely ignore data from prior to the AP poll, a fairly arbitrary delineation in the history of college football (vs. the introduction of the forward pass in 1906 or a TD becoming 6 points in 1912). This is presumably due to the difficulty in accessing data and making meaning out of the 1869-1935 seasons without the poll. In this ranking, I have instead tried to value every season in college football history equally, and thus, I have included data from before the AP Poll was first released to determine the best programs of all time.
I’ve read articles in the past that valued, in my opinion, strange data points regarding the best college football programs of all time. For example, the # of draft picks (or first rounders) a school has had or the # of heisman winners, which has next to nothing to do with how a college team performed on the field. Others include # of conference championships, which are far too dependent upon the strength of that conference in the given year. Win % is intriguing in and of itself, but it overweights newer seasons, as the # of games played has increased over the years. Another issue with using these stats is that assigning a point value to them is entirely arbitrary, resulting in a distorted/user-edited outcome. I am also uninterested in adhering to the NCAA’s vacated wins/championships. For these reasons, none of the aforementioned data points will be used in my rating system.
Methodology
In my opinion, the only data points that are relevant are where each school was rated/ranked at the end of each season and how many National Championships they won throughout the years. This also keeps my hand out of the data as much as possible, unlike some of the other stats (e.g. # of heisman winners). Previous attempts have also disregarded retroactive computer ratings in their analyses. While I’m not arguing for the superiority of computer ratings (e.g. FPI, SP+, Sagarin) over human rankings (e.g. AP Poll, CFP, Coaches Poll), there are pros and cons to each method. The issue with only looking at final AP Poll rankings is twofold. First, human voters tend to overweight a school’s record, thereby assigning little emphasis on the difficulty of their schedule. They skew more towards “most deserving” > “best,” and therefore, teams with great records are often ranked higher than may be warranted (see: some G5 teams who finish 11-1 and are ranked above “better” 8-4 P4 teams). Second, the AP Poll only ranks 25 teams (in some instances, 20). This is particularly concerning for our purposes since being the 25th “best” team a certain year is hardly a momentous gap from the 26th “best” team. Looking at only the AP Poll would yield the result that team A, who finished 3 seasons at 8-4 (AP #25), 1-11, and 0-12 had a better 3 years than team B, who finished 7-5 (AP #26; first team out), 7-5 (AP #26; first team out), and 6-6. Over the long term, the AP Poll therefore overweights “successful” years by making no distinction between mediocre and abysmal seasons.
Certainly, computer ratings also have their downfalls. They often value a school’s “talent” and factor that into the overall ratings (e.g. FPI). Additionally, results on the field are somewhat minimized, as head-to-head outcomes are ignored and a team’s # of wins are largely unimportant. Ultimately, while rankings are retrodictive (explain how the season went), ratings are predictive (who has a better chance of winning if they played tomorrow?). The cons of human polls are the pros of computer polls, and vice versa. Therefore, I believe it is important to use both human and computer polls in a ranking of the best college football programs of all time. While personally I think a proper ranking for a given year would look something like a 67% human and 33% computer element (like the old BCS), the AP Poll’s inclusion of only 25 teams leads me to use them equally, or 50/50.
So here’s how I equally weighted human and computer polls for each season from 1869-2024: I split college football history into two “eras,” the pre-AP Poll era (1869-1935) and the AP Poll era (1936-2024). In the AP Poll era, I tallied up (technically, I just used https://collegefootballnews.com/college-football/ap-college-football-poll-greatest-programs-all-time) the total # of AP “points” for each end of the year AP Poll throughout its history, where finishing #1 is 25 points, #2 is 24 points, #25 is 1 point, etc. On the computer side of things, for the years 1936-1999, I used Bill Connelly’s retroactive SP+ ratings (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQhAEEDU9kLgH//_VcA7zhIWMqVIOKz6En5lVmc09o9WpEItA3w285Cv2FvGKGI0nKnoONJ-VQNf4PIvB/pubhtml), given that SP+ is both well-respected and its historic data is easily retrievable. For the years 2000-2024, I consulted ThePredictionTracker (https://www.thepredictiontracker.com/ncaaresults.php?year=00), which, starting in 2000, has ranked the best computer models for each season. I sought out the top performing metric based on % of games “guessed” correctly for each season, rather than its success against the spread, absolute error, etc. This decision inherently selects the metric with the most retrodictive power/the one that is most representative of the results on the field. I used the data from the highest rated model that I was able to recover its entire 1-130ish ratings from the Massey Composite site (https://masseyratings.com/cf/arch/compare2000-16.htm) for that particular year.
For the years prior to 1936, I exclusively used the Billingsley Report (https://cfrc.com/final-reports), an NCAA-certified “major selector” (http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football//_records/2022/FBS.pdf, pg. 112), rather than using one “human poll” and one “computer poll.” He specifically notes that “my rankings are a combination of the ‘best team’ and ‘most deserving’ team,” and thus, are already a blend of human/computer ranking methodologies. To my knowledge, Billingsley is the only retroactive poll that has rated/ranked every team in the FBS in every season from 1869 onward.
The final aspect of my rating is total National Championships (NC), which makes up 10% of the formula. As we all know, on numerous occasions throughout the sports’ history, the NCAA’s “major selectors” chose different schools as their NC for a given year, and thus, multiple teams have an argument for the crown. With this in mind, we cannot award 4 NCs in 1919 (Harvard, Illinois, Notre Dame, Texas A&M), yet only award 1 in recent years (e.g. 2004-2024), as this would inflate the relative impact of years with “multiple champions” and diminish those with only 1. So, in years with multiple champions, partial NCs will be awarded. In the aforementioned 1919 example, each team would be awarded .25 NC’s. If you think this is odd, of course it is; this is college football! Keep in mind that if we didn’t have a playoff in 2024, Oregon, Notre Dame, and Georgia would all have had an argument as a/the NC according to major selectors, and they may have all claimed a NC. In hindsight, imagine how silly it would be to award each of those teams a NC in 2024 … especially considering none of them actually won it! Though perhaps the NCAA’s officially unofficial list of NCs can be found in the FBS records (http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football//_records/2022/FBS.pdf, pg. 114-119), it seems that elsewhere they are even more selective with who the real champion(s) was/were a particular year (https://www.ncaa.com/history/football/fbs). Given that the …
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