College football rating system
The Billingsley Report is a college football rating system developed in the late 1960s to determine a national champion. Billingsley has actively rated college football teams on a current basis since 1970. Beginning in 1999, Billingsley's ratings were included as one of seven mathematical formulas included in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rankings.
Unlike the other mathematical formulas included in the BCS rankings, the Billingsley Report was not prepared by a trained mathematician or statistician. Instead, the Billingsley Report is prepared by Richard Billingsley (born c. 1951), a lifelong college football fan in Hugo, Oklahoma. Billingsley attended Texas Bible College, became a minister and later a consultant in the country music business. He began preparing his own weekly college football ratings as a hobby.
Billingsley has also applied his ratings methodology retroactively to select national champions for each year from 1869 to 1870 and from 1872 to 1969. Since 1996, the "Billingsley Report" has been one of the selectors of historic national champions recognized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in its Football Bowl Subdivision record book.
The NCAA describes Billingsley's methodology as follows: " The main feature of his system is the inclusion of a unique rule for head-to-head competition, with the overall system consisting of a balanced approach to wins, losses, strength of schedule, and home-field advantage. A slight weight is given to most recent performance. The Billingsley formula does not use margin of victory, however, the Billingsley MOV formula does include margin of victory in the calculations.". Analysis shows that Billingsley's ranking system typically strongly disagrees with other computer ranking systems and more closely resembles human ranking schemes, likely due to the "ad hoc" and often self-conflicting nature of Billingsley's many ratings adjustments, such as weighting later season games as more important than early season games, adjusting win values by stadium attendance, forcing head to head victors to be ranked above their defeated opponents (but only until their next game), and discounting the value of wins by teams with more losses.
Richard Billingsley is also the owner of the College Football Research Center.
National champions.
Billingsley Report selections first appeared in the 1995 edition of the NCAA records book, listing champions since 1960. In the 1996 book these champions were joined with retrospective selections all the way back to 1869. This original set of champions was last printed in the 1999 NCAA records book.
In 1998 Billingsley adjusted his formula in order to participate as a computer poll in the Bowl Championship Series rankings. He re-ranked all past seasons with this new formula; these new champions were printed in the 2000–2003 NCAA records books.
Prior to the 2001 season, Billingsley again changed the formula in order to remove "Margin of Victory" from the system's BCS calculations. This third set of champions appeared in the 2004–2012 NCAA books.
Finally, beginning in 2013, the NCAA records books profess to list both Billingsley's "No Margin of Victory" and "Margin of Victory" champions is cases where they differ. However, this list is "not" a simple superset of the previous two sets of champions.
The table below lists the 4 distinct sets of Billingsley Report national champions printed in NCAA records books since 1995. The selections are additionally sourced to the College Football Research Center website, where Billingsley made the same updates to his national champions after each change to the Billingsley Report formula.
† Teams chosen solely by Billingsley amongst NCAA-designated "major selectors".
References.
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