My adventure in resume ranking continues

In this weeks Blogpoll thread, I tried to help out by averaging the rank of best wins, best losses, and strength of schedule of the top nine teams. Today I got really bored, so I decided to make a top 25 poll out of the same formula, with one minor tweak.

 I looked at every team with two losses or less, and stacked them up against each other. I used only the 40 two loss or better teams because, as bored as I was, I didn't want to do this for all the 1A schools, and a three loss team probably wouldn't have been ranked anyway. I used the following criteria-

Sagarin strength of schedule-the team with the hardest schedule gets 1 point, next gets 2, and so on, all the way to 40 points for the team in the pool with the weakest schedule. This had a weight of .3

Quality of wins-I looked at the three best wins for each team. I used my best judgement to determine which teams wins looked the most impressive. I then ranked them 1 to 40, 1 being the most impressive. This also had a .3 weight

Quality of losses-all the undefeated teams tied for first. From there, it was ranked in order of the one loss teams that lost to the highest ranked team, then the two loss teams. This also had a .3 weight

"Style Points"-This is the tweak I referred to. Since how a team performs on the field matters, I gave the last bit of weight to a measure which was the average of a team's national rank in yards per play, yards per play allowed, scoring offense, and scoring defense. I included this not only to use a better idea of how a team had been playing, but also to remove some of the bias that came from me ranking the quality of wins and losses. The team with the lowest average rank got 1 point, and so on. This had a .1 weight.

In the end, I added all the weighted scores together, and the team with the lowest score was ranked #1. The results were actually pretty interesting, and in some instances forced me to rethink the way I had previously been judging some teams

1. Texas
2. USC
3. Alabama
4. Penn State
5. Oklahoma
6. UGA
7. UF
8. Oklahoma state
9. Ohio state
10. Utah
11. Boise St
12. Mizzou
13. TCU
14. Texas Tech
15. UNC
16. LSU
17. Michigan St
18. UCONN
19. Minnesota
20. Cal
21. Pitt
22. Ball State
23. GT
24. Oregon
25. FSU  

The first thing I noticed was the lack of love for Texas Tech. They were really being treated the way you would expect a mid major to be. They did well in style points and in quality losses, but a lack of quality wins and a weak schedule really hampered them. That should shake out over the next few weeks, one way or the other.

I was also surprised (shocked, actually) by how high USC was ranked. The loss to Oregon State didn't register at all. This was due to the fact that they were ranked highest in style points, had wins over two ranked opponents, and (much to my surprise) had the hardest schedule of any team I looked at. This got me to thinking-even with a loss, has USC's body of work been more impressive than that of Penn State or Alabama? Outside of a pair of stellar first halfs against a swiftly sinking Clemson squad and UGA, Alabama hasn't necessarily been as impressive all around as USC. USC performed better against their common opponent with Penn State, and the Trojans also have a win over Oregon to hang their hats on. A very unexpected ranking, to be sure, but couldn't it maybe be justified?

Does anybody else have thoughts on the way this little exercise of mine turned out? I really think its interesting to look at, considering that this takes a much more objective perspective on things I ever have before. Also, I would like to point out that I am in NO WAY trying to steal the thunder from Kyle's blogpoll post. I just kind of got into the whole ranking thing I came up with, and decided to let it play out as far as it could.