QPRS (QUALITY POINT RATING SYSTEM) - QPRS is a mathematical formula rating system for evaluating the performance of American football teams which takes into account a team's Schedule Strength, Won-Loss Record, and its Points Fielded / Points Allowed.
I am currently only able to do a final end of season college football ranking. My "day job" often involves long or unpredictable hours, travel, etc...Perhaps in retirement, I'll have the time to be able to do a weekly standings of sorts.
My QPRS system is not overly complicated but it is labor-intensive since I'm a shameful computer "dinosaur" and I do all my calculations by hand with pencil, paper, and a calculator. I rate circa the top 65 Div 1A teams (all those with a winning or even record plus any that have particularly noteworthy "tough" schedules) to then determine my Top 40.
The Quality Point Rating System {QPRS} evolved as a result of this writer's frustrations with the week-to-week opinion poll system of ranking America's top college football teams. The media polls, whether Associated Press {AP}, United Press International {UPI}, CNN/USA Today, or other, reflect the subjectivity of their voting audiences. I always believed that a more methodical approach to rating teams such as the methods used by parent organizations to rate chess players or tennis players would be more desirable
At the same time, I decided to keep the rating system simple enough that it can be performed by any individual who owns a calculator, pen, paper, and who has access to complete football score results. Time is another factor. I find that it usually takes me a full workday {eight hours} to comfortably rate the top 20 teams of any football season using QPRS.
QPRS underwent considerable testing and revisions before I settled on its current form. Some of its rating conclusions on certain football teams will be sure to challenge long-held popular conceptions. Top teams in the general public's mind do not always fare so well while lesser known teams from particularly competitive seasons emerge at the high end of the scale. {Note: In comparing teams from different eras, I do not for one moment pretend that a team from the early years could beat its modern-day counterpart. Football tactics in college have greatly evolved while players have become more powerful, faster, and more professional than their forebears. Rather, I compare how one team did within its season against how well a later team performed against its opponents in its season.}
Unlike the polls which often take on a narrow "who-beat-whom" focus and which seem to rely on increasingly short-term memory as the season progresres, I wanted to create a formula which would accurately measure a team's strength based on its overall season-long performance. I decided early-on that to accurately gauge a team's greatness in comparison to its competitors, it would be necessary to examine how it fared in three key categories:
In order to demonstrate how the Won-Loss-Tie record, Schedule Strength, and average margin of victory/defeat interact in QPRS, the reader's attention is drawn to the examples which appear below. Each involves three hypothetical teams labelled, for the sake of simplicity, Team A, Team B, and Team C. In each example, Team A is the strongest team, Team B is in the middle, and Team C is the weakest team.
EXAMPLE ONE: Differing Won-Loss-Tie Records: All factors for each of the teams remain constant except for different Won-Loss Tie records. Each team played a 12-game season.
| Team | Won-Loss-Tie | Schedule Strength | Average Pts Fielded | Average Pts Allowed | Overall Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team A | 11-1-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 347.40 |
| Team B | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 314.00 |
| Team C | 9-3-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 280.60 |
| Team | Won-Loss-Tie | Schedule Strength | Average Pts Fielded | Average Pts Allowed | Overall Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team A | 10-2-0 | 50.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 347.40 |
| Team B | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 314.00 |
| Team C | 10-2-0 | 30.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 280.60 |
| Team | Won-Loss-Tie | Schedule Strength | Average Pts Fielded | Average Pts Allowed | Overall Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team A | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 30.00 | 10.00 | 340.00 |
| Team B | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 314.00 |
| Team C | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 10.00 | 10.00 | 270.60 |
| Team | Won-Loss-Tie | Schedule Strength | Average Pts Fielded | Average Pts Allowed | Overall Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team A | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 5.00 | 344.00 |
| Team B | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 10.00 | 314.00 |
| Team C | 10-2-0 | 40.00 | 20.00 | 15.00 | 291.15 |
In QPRS, the Won-Loss-Tie record of a school and its Schedule Strength are inextricably linked. With regard to Schedule Strength, I look at Div 1A as being roughly divided between "normal schedule" {most major conferences, leading independents} and "weak schedule" {Big Sky, Big West, Mid-American, and to a large extent, Western Athletic}. Up until very recently {1990's}, a number of East coast teams {many now in the Atlantic Coast or Big East conferences} would from year-to-year fluctuate between "normal" and "weak" schedule category based on their opponents each year. Some independents cross the line from "normal" to "weak" from year-to-year such as So. Miss., Memphis St., Army, Navy, Ea. Carolina, Louisana Tech, etc. Some of these, such as Louisville, Cincinnati, Tulsa, and others appear to be making a determined effort to stay in the "normal" category of late. I treat Div 1AA opponents, when they occur in Div 1A play, as a third and weaker category choosing the category in which a team belongs can be somewhat subjective in cases where a close call is involved. This was particularly true ten or more years ago when the greater number of eastern independents created unevenness and some tough calls. As recently as 1982, for example, Penn St. played a number of close-call "weak schedule" opponents. However, since these "weak schedule" opponents were by-and-large winners, the net result is that Penn St. still comes out credited with a fairly tough overall Schedule Strength {53.74} for 1982.
For the sake of reader interest, the previous examples using Teams A through C relate to fairly successful teams whose performances would usually put them in the upper half of most end-of-season polls or formula-based rankings. While the Won-Loss-Tie record is self-explanatory, the following is a rough guide of how to interpret QPRS ratings in the areas of Schedule Strength, Average Points Fielded, Average Points Allowed, and the respective Offense, Defense, and Overall Power Ratings:
Schedule Strength: 60s - Very Tough Schedule 50s - Tough Schedule 40s - Average Schedule 30s - Weak Schedule 20s - Very Weak Schedule Average Points Fielded: Average Points Allowed: 40+ - Very High-Scoring Offense - 5 - Very Tough Defense 30 - High-Scoring Offense -10 - Tough Defense 20 - Average Scoring Offense -15 - Average Defense 1O - Below Average Scoring Offense -20 - Below Average Defense less than 1O - Poor Scoring Offense -25 - Poor Defense POWER RATINGS: Offense: Defense: Overall: 201 - 250 181 - 225 400 - 500 = Outstanding 151 - 200 136 - 180 300 - 399 = Good 1O1 - 150 91 - 135 200 - 299 = Average 51 - 1OO 46 - 90 1OO - 199 = Below Average 1 - 50 1 - 45 0 - 99 = PoorIn sum, I hope the above.explanations are useful toward understanding the QPRS NCAA College Football rating system and that the reader will find QPRS rating results of past and present college football teams of interest
(c) June 1994 by Clyde P. Berryman
The amazing upsets of this past year served to highlight just how off-target many of the pre-season polls or rankings could be. You obviously can't stop human nature and everyone enjoys to speculate and have their pre-season favorites. However, I have always been against polls or rating systems which actually make use of a pre-season ranking as a starting point by assigning teams a subjective pre-season ranking order. I think we all remember a few seasons ago how Auburn missed a chance at playing in the national title game only because they started off too low in the pre-season polls. An arbitrary starting pecking order based on pre-season 'gut feelings' only serves to pollute or skew the year-long validity of a poll or ranking which incorporates such subjective information. Serious rankings should be based only on results which take place on the football field once the season is underway.
One thing which QPRS also does is 'self-correct' with regard to the difficulty of a team's opponents as the year progresses. Just as an example, when Oregon St. beat California this year, it was facing a 5-0 opponent and it got a nice bounce in the polls for defeating a highly-ranked, unbeaten team. By the time 'lowly' Stanford beat them near season's end, California had lost five times and the game went by almost unnoticed. Does Stanford deserve less credit for beating California in 2007 than Oregon State? It was the same California team - pretty much the same players, same coaches. What happened is that Oregon State was simply the first team chronologically to learned how to exploit California's vulnerablities. These flaws were there when Tennessee, Arizona or Oregon played them beforehand but they simply didn't get the job done. In some polls or rankings, Oregon State would get credit for beating a highly-ranked 5-0 California (100%) while Stanford would only get credit for beating a forgotten 6-6 (50%) California which by then had dropped well out of the Top 25. So in QPRS, at year's end, both Oregon State and Stanford (and all the other teams before, after and in-between) get the same credit for having beaten a California team with a 7-6 season record. Obviously, margins of victory will differ and may affect the ratings but they all played against 2007 California.
Clyde Berryman / hardbraking at hotmail dot com
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