Who's number one? - ranking college football teams for the 2003 season

This article uses the method of pairwise comparisons to rank college football teams. This issue is of some importance due to debate over, which team actually won the national championship in 2003-2004. Some polls ranked LSU number 1 while others ranked USC number 1. Our method, based on pairwise comparisons, finds LSU to be clearly ranked number 1 but USC ends up ranked third behind Miami of Ohio. The Southeastern Conference (SEC) does well in our ranking scheme because the SEC produced not only the best team in the country (LSU) but also the only team to beat the best team in the country (UF). We also find that our ranking does not correspond very closely to rankings in either the AP or Coaches poll. Auxiliary regressions with our rank as the independent variable explain 58 and 50% of the variation in the AP and Coaches rankings, respectively.