Greetings and welcome back college football fans. After 145 games in weeks 0/1 we are ready for the first GCR. Some of the teams in the top 25 may seem oddly placed, so let’s walk through how the GCR functions. First, there are no preseason ranks. All 261 begin the season tied for first, or last if that’s how you prefer to see it. There is no bias to any team. After each game is played, the calculations are run for every game played so far that year for every team, as of “today”. In other words, there is no recency bias. The GCR sees every game played as just being played so a team that starts 6-0 loses to someone. At that point, the winning team gets credit for beating a 6-1 team. Every team that lost to the previously unbeaten team gets credit for losing to a 6-1 team. If that team ends up 6-7, that record applies to all 13 opponents. It is important to note that no future games are part of the GCR. The ranking is broken into two parts, which are continually balanced against each other for equity, the Strength of Schedule (SOS) and the Performance (PS) Scores. SOS is a calculation based on how good a given team’s opponents are “today” which includes each opponent’s opponents’ SOS for completeness. Part of the calculation includes a discount for playing teams below a given team’s level (Power 5 is higher than Group of 5 is higher than FCS is higher than Other) and a bonus for playing above. The PS is based on outcome of games played (wins count more than losses), adjusted for location (home/away/neutral), and point differential (a sliding scale that rewards dominance without rewarding running up the score). After a few games, the GCR allows me to apply a prediction of the winner of upcoming games, but the non-bias nature of the calculations means games involving teams that have not played or only played once result in illogical predictions (e.g., team 1 to win by 200.5 points). All of that said, the rankings are valid, whatever that means, based on the body of work each team has produced thus far.

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In week 1, the current playoff mode would pit Alabama (1-0/1) against Minnesota (1-0/4) while Georgia (1-0/2) would face Duke (1-0/3). I would be remiss not to mention the momentous news about playoff expansion. Sometime between 2024 and 2026, there will be 12 teams in the playoffs. The top four spots go to the highest-ranking conference champions (who get a bye in the first round) and the next 8 go to the 8 highest-ranked teams that aren’t conference champs. Here’s how that would look using today’s GCR:

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Here is this year’s inaugural GCR. Changes will be plentiful for the next few weeks, based on previous years, but this is how they stack up from Alabama to the 9 0-0 teams tied for last. Thanks for reading, G

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