2022 College Football Rankings

The field131 teams

859.0 — worstElo rating2300.0 — best

One mark per team. Elo rating, all 131 teams.

College football teams ranked by Elo rating.
#	Team	Rec	Conf	Elo	SP+	Off / Def	FPI	SRS	AP	Δ vs AP
1

Best offense: Ohio State+22.9 pts/gm
Best defense: Iowa-20.8 pts/gm

We rate higher

Ranked teams the model likes more than the human poll.

2022 coverage: Elo 131/131 · SP+ 131/131 · FPI 131/131 · SRS 131/131 · CORE off/def 131/131 · AP poll 51. Metrics with no teams yet this season are left out of the table rather than shown as a column of dashes.

What do these columns mean?

Rec CollegeFootballData: Wins–losses. Sorting by it uses win percentage, so 3-0 outranks 4-3.
Elo CollegeFootballData: A results-based rating: teams trade points for every game, and beating a strong team is worth more than beating a weak one. It knows who won and by how much, and nothing else — so it needs games before it means anything.
SP+ Bill Connelly, via CollegeFootballData: An efficiency rating built from play-by-play rather than results, expressed as a predicted scoring margin against an average team. It is published before kickoff, which is why this board falls back to it early in a season.
FPI ESPN, via CollegeFootballData: ESPN's Football Power Index — its own predicted margin against an average opponent.
SRS CollegeFootballData: Simple Rating System: average scoring margin, adjusted for the strength of who you played.
AP · Δ vs AP Associated Press: The human poll of sportswriters. Δ is how far this board's order differs from theirs — positive means we have the team higher than the voters do.
Off / Def (CORE) Gridpex — ours, published nowhere else: Opponent- and situation-adjusted efficiency, in points per 100 qualifying plays, above average. Offense is better when high, defense when low. It is the one rating here that publishes how sure it is: /ratings shows the range each team could plausibly occupy, and most of the table is wider than the gap between neighbouring ranks.

Every rating here is bought in except CORE, which we build. How we build it →

What is CORE? (our own rating — not available anywhere else)

Every other column on this page is bought in — Elo, SP+, FPI, SRS and the AP poll all arrive from CollegeFootballData. CORE is the exception. We build it here, from play-by-play, and it is published nowhere else.

It answers a narrower question than a power rating: how good is this team per play, once you remove the situations it happened to face and the opponents it happened to draw? Two teams can post identical yards per play when one of them ran its snaps at a three-score lead against the worst defenses on the schedule. That gap is most of the difference between the two numbers, and every raw per-play stat carries it.

So we remove both, in two stages. First the situation: each play’s expected value is predicted from game state alone — period, clock, score margin, down, distance, field position, home or away, pass or rush — with no team identity in the model at all, and what is left over is the part the situation does not explain. Then the opponent: offenses and defenses form one connected network over a season, so both sides are fitted at once by ridge regression rather than credited separately. Ridge specifically, because in September the schedule graph is barely connected and an unregularised fit hands a huge rating to whoever beat an overmatched opener.

Reported in points per 100 qualifying plays, above average. Offense is better when high, defense when low. Overtime, garbage time, FBS-vs-FCS games, special teams and non-scrimmage plays are all excluded.

⚠ CORE is a measurement, not a forecast. It says what a team has already done per play, adjusted. It does not say who wins next week — that is a separate model, and the two are kept as separate objects on purpose. Full method →

We rate higher

Model vs the AP

We rate lower