The Grid answers both these questions for the top programs in the country—all 64 teams from the five major conferences, plus a handful of others that belong in any college football conversation.
The horizontal axis shows how good the team is projected to be based on a survey of preseason evaluations. Some of these use the old-fashioned eye test, others rely on complex algorithms. That’s the easy part. What’s harder is what happens on the vertical axis—or shame meter.
We begin with cold numbers, a weighted calculation of academic performance, recent NCAA violations and probation, attendance figures, athletic-department subsidies and player arrests. Schools were also dinged if they have a dubious history with injury mismanagement—like the handful of programs involved in concussion-related lawsuits.
But those figures don’t capture everything, and no program demonstrates this better in 2016 than Baylor. How do you rank a school that mishandled sexual assault cases involving football players, a scandal so seismic that it cost president Ken Starr and football coach Art Briles their jobs?
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This is where the “ick” factor comes in. When the numbers didn’t capture the magnitude of the problems at a particular program, we punished the teams that brought shame to their fans in a way that didn’t show up in any data set.
At one end of the spectrum, there’s Northwestern, whose fans may not have high hopes of a Big Ten title anytime soon, but can at least be proud that their team has stayed squeaky clean off the field. They’re in the
Grid’s top left, where grade-point averages might exceed win totals.
The big winner on this year’s Grid is closest to the
top right corner: Stanford, an academic powerhouse that will contend in this year’s Pac-12. This top right quadrant is the Grid’s lone safe zone: an exclusive club for programs that are both good at football and have done relatively well off the field too.
But many of the top teams in the country, like No. 1 Alabama and No. 4 Florida State, can be found in the
bottom right, where the football is strong but the program’s off-the-field performance leaves much to be desired.
Then there’s the place where no program wants to be:
The bottom left. This is where fans and professors can clink glasses and agree to watch something else on Saturdays.
Write to Andrew Beaton at
andrew.beaton@wsj.com