A Penalized Maximum Likelihood Approach for the Rankings of College Football Teams Independent of Victory Margins

We introduce a penalized maximum likelihood approach for ranking all NCAA Division 1-A college football teams. The model does not consider margin of victory and is based solely on win/loss data. Despite the simplicity, the model leads to rankings which exhibit greater agreement with expert opinion (i.e. AP and Coaches polls) than the models his-torically and currently used by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The model can be implemented using standard statistical software packages