Last College Football Season one of the more popular features I ran was the Conference Strength Report. Well, I’ll do it again this year and it’s improved. Last year I tracked only the 6 BCS Conferences and Notre Dame, this year I’ll track all 119 DI football programs and conferences. Here’s the pre-season ranking:

For those of you who didn’t read the CSR last season, here’s a little primer on what to understand. For this ranking, since none of the games have been played yet, we’re using the College Football News rankings for each team (aggregated and averaged into conferences) to determine the initial pecking order. Why the CFN ratings? It’s pretty simple really, these folks seem to have the least bias of all the ranking services and they follow all 119 teams. The rating was determined by giving each team a number 1-119 depending upon their rank, the higher the rank, the higher the point total i.e., team #1 gets 119 points and team 119 gets 1 point. This ranking will be used each week as a sanity check relative to the other data tracked.

Speaking of that data, the main things tracked are: out of conference record, out of conference record excluding patsies (DIAA schools,) and out of conference record against BCS Conference competition (games against any of the Big 6 conferences and Notre Dame.) The win-loss record is important, and win rate is the ranking criteria. Preference is given to conferences who play the fewest patsies and the most BCS competition tempered by overall win rate. For example, if you’re going to play a IAA team (ahem, Michigan,) you need to beat them.

Can’t wait for the season to start – the first of these reports will be posted the Wednesday/Thursday after the first week’s games.

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