Current college football merit ratings [updated 2/11/25]
Merit combines a team’s average game control (Performance) against its year-to-date schedule (Schedule).
Both Performance and Schedule are computed as percentiles ranging from zero to 100, with the approximate weighting:
60% Performance
40% Schedule
While calculated objectively to remove human bias, merit ratings are designed to reflect more traditional ranking values, emphasizing year-to-date record/results over predictive power but still considering the dominance level of the games.
Pre-bowl merit ratings are the mcillecesports.com representation of worthiness for the College Football Playoff ranking, exclusive of the conference championship criteria. They are not designed to predict the CFP Committee’s ranking.
2024 Final Merit RatingsADDITIONAL DETAILS
The Performance metric used is the square root of Control (described at the Game Ratings page) for the winning team and one minus that number for the losing team. Using the square root of the Control percentage emphasizes wins and losses without removing the value of a dominant performance.
For example, consider games with Control = 55% and Control = 70%. In the first, the analytic value for the merit ratings is √0.55 = 0.74, and in the second, the value is √0.70 = 0.84. The losing team values would be 0.26 and 0.16, respectively. In each case, there is substantial value for winning the game, but more credit is given for the more dominant win.
The approximate weights of 60% and 40% are neither arbitrary nor predefined. These weights naturally fall out of the strength of schedule iteration process and are based on the range of values for Performance and Schedule, prior to standardization into percentile form.
Performance has a larger range and more weight because there is a wider variety of Performance averages than Schedule averages, and so the merit ratings naturally reflect the underlying distributions.
