Congratulations to the 2011 National Champions:

Alabama - Division I-A National Champions

North Dakota St. - Division I-AA National Champions

Pittsburgh St. (KS) - Division II National Champions

Wisconsin-Whitewater - Division III National Champions

Saint Xavier (IL) - NAIA National Champions

Schedule Rankings Discussion

I feel very comfortable with the Winning Pct., National Championship, and Bowl components of the rankings.  The Schedule Rankings is the last component of the ranking system that I do not feel is correct. 

Lets look at this past decade rankings and review the schedules of the top 2 teams - Southern California and Florida.  I currently have Southern California ranked with 450.42 points and Florida with 390.15.  This indicates that Southern California had a considerable tougher schedule than Florida.  The following matrix shows how many teams both Southern California and Florida played from the years 2000-2009:

This data shows Florida played 37 games against teams ranked in the Final Top 10 Decade Rankings and Southern California played 12 games against Top 10 competition.  The Win Pct. column shows how often both Florida and Southern California combined to win against the different groups of teams.  As expected the better the opponent the win pct. goes down.

The following table shows what pct of games were played against Top 10 teams, teams ranked from 11-50, and teams ranked over 51.

This table shows the schedule philosophy of the 2 teams - Florida played roughly an equal amount of teams ranked at the very top, ranked in the mid-level range, and ranked at the bottom.  Southern California played the majority of their games against teams ranked in the mid-level range.

The data in the above tables shows in my opinion Southern California did not play a significant more difficult schedule than Florida this past decade. One could argue which team played the tougher schedule, but I think the two teams should be much closer to each other in the strength of schedule rankings. 

I plan to use a more progressive system than currently used to assign schedule points according to the 1st table categories giving more points for playing Top 10 teams and less for each group ranked lower.  I will accept comments on this discussion during the month of March and publish updated rankings at the end of the month.  Intelligent comments will receive a reply and may be posted on this page.