Current college football CARAT ratings [FINAL for 2025]
The Cartesian Rank Total (CARAT) rating system is a refinement of the experimental strength of record concept described in this blog post.
In short, the CARAT system is based on the idea that EVERY team plays EVERY schedule, and then the difficulty of every game can be assessed compared to how ALL OTHER teams would perform in the same situation. How a team would perform is based on power ratings, home/away/neutral sites, and logistic win probability models. (more on methodology below*)
The total value of all games played is added up into the CARAT rating for each team: The # of wins above (or below) the average record ALL OTHER teams would have playing that exact same schedule.
College Football Playoff
- 4-Diamond Team: National Champion
- 3-Diamond Teams: 100% CFP
- 2-Diamond Teams: 80% CFP
- 1-Diamond Teams: 10% CFP
Teams are also assigned a # of Diamonds based on their CARAT rating. +2 CARATs = +1 Diamond. These groupings become more and more useful as the season progresses and teams are contending for the College Football Playoff.
In each of the past 6 seasons (2019 – 2025), there has been exactly one 4-Diamond team, and that team won the National Championship each year.
*The methodology is nearly the same as described in the blog post above, except for two key modifications:
- All calculations are performed in a single run, based on current power ratings, rather than in thousands of simulations. (The simulations took considerable time to run but converged to essentially the same ranking as a single run, anyway.)
- Instead of treating a win as one and loss as zero, the game control metric is used to infer an in-game win probability, which is then compared to the Cartesian game difficulty to determine a performance rating. (This approach gives substantial value for winning games but also accounts for in-game performance, recognizing the difference between a blowout and a Hail Mary, and resulted in substantial improvement in historical rankings.)
The range of CARAT values for each game is (-1.00, 1.00):
- A value close to 1.00 represents a dominant performance in a game that few other FBS teams would win.
- EX: Ohio State’s neutral-site blowout victory over undefeated Oregon in the 2024 College Football Playoff (Value = +0.94)
- A value close to -1.00 represents a lackluster performance in a game that few other FBS teams would lose.
- EX: MTSU’s embarrassing 20-point home loss to FCS Austin Peay in 2025 Week 1 (Value = -0.89)