Ranked on who you beat, and where.

Resume, not power

Most computer rankings are power rankings: they estimate how good a team is and who would win on a neutral field. Penta is a resume ranking: it adds up what a team has already accomplished. The two answer different questions, and they disagree on purpose.

A team can be excellent and still sit low here if it hasn’t beaten anyone yet. A team the computers doubt can sit high if it keeps winning tough games. Penta does use a power ranking — the Massey composite — but only to measure how hard each opponent was to beat. Your own ranking comes entirely from your results against them.

How a game is scored

1. Start with the opponent’s rank. Opponent strength is the Massey composite, a consensus of dozens of independent computer rating systems. One rank per team, 1 to 365.
2. Adjust for where the game was played. A road win is harder, so the opponent counts as better than their rank. A home win counts as easier.

   Away	rank × 0.7
   Home	rank × 1.3
   Neutral site	rank, unchanged

   That adjusted rank places the game in one of five bands.
3. Score the result. A win is worth 25 points for beating the best possible opponent, down to 1 for the worst. A loss is the mirror image: 1 point for losing to the best, 25 for losing to the worst. A win over any team plus a loss to that same team always adds up to 26. It is the same scale as Penta’s football ranking.

The five bands

Within each band, points fall on a straight line. The top band is the steepest: beating #1 is worth 25, beating #50 is worth 18. Each band below is a little flatter, so the biggest differences are between wins over the best teams. Losses work the same way in reverse: losing to a top team costs little, and losing to a bad one costs the most.

Games against non-Division I opponents score nothing and don’t count toward a team’s per-game average. Negative numbers appear in parentheses, so a loss worth −2.2 shows as (2.2).

What’s on the site

• RankingsAll 365 teams with their record in each band and movement since last week. Two lines run across the table: under #16, the top four seed lines, and under #68, the size of the tournament field. Click a row for a quick look at any team.
• The RaceThis week’s biggest games by what’s at stake, the top 16 traced week by week, and each team’s ceiling if it wins out.
• Best Wins, Worst LossesEvery result in Division I, ranked by what it was worth.
• Team pagesResults and the remaining schedule, with what each upcoming game is worth to win or lose; the team’s rank by week; and every season back to 2022–23.
• FAQThe full method, including the parts people argue about.

How it compares to the NCAA quadrants

The NCAA’s quadrants move their cutoffs by venue: Quadrant 1 is a home game against the top 30, a neutral game against the top 50, or a road game against the top 75. Penta adjusts the opponent’s rank instead and keeps the bands fixed, which lands in nearly the same place.

The difference is inside the bands. The quadrants count every Quadrant 1 win the same. Penta scores each game on a sliding scale, so beating #3 is worth more than beating #45. It also splits the bottom into two bands, so a loss to #180 and a loss to #340 are not treated alike.

Does it work?

We scored the last three seasons using only the games played before Selection Sunday. Ten of the committee’s twelve #1 seeds finished in Penta’s top four, and all twelve finished in the top seven. The committee works from its own resume tools, and Penta lands in the same place.

One caveat: those seasons are rated with each year’s final composite, which already knows how the tournament went.

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