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 138.
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. The scale runs to 25 to match the 25-rank bands.

The five bands

Within each band, points fall on a straight line. The top band is the steepest: beating #1 is worth 25, beating #25 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 FCS 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 138 teams with their record in each band, movement since last week, and the playoff line drawn under #12. Click a row for a quick look at any team.
• The RaceThis week’s biggest games by what’s at stake, every playoff-field team’s rank traced week by week, and each team’s ceiling if it wins out.
• Best Wins, Worst LossesEvery result in the sport, 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 25 seasons of history.
• FAQThe full method, including the parts people argue about.

Does it work?

Scored against 24 finished seasons, the team with the most Penta points was the eventual national champion 19 times and finished in the top four every time. The misses are the years you’d expect — 2011, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2023 — when the champion had a visibly thinner resume than someone else. That’s the point of a resume ranking: it tells you what a team has done, not what it might do.

Go to the rankings →