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RealignmentJunkie Ballot for 2025 Week 7

Ballot Type: Computer

Submitted: Oct. 6, 2025, 9:52 p.m.

Overall Rationale: Details on each team's ranking can be found here: https://storage.googleapis.com/thexcomputerpoll-central/Output.html This only takes into account wins and losses, margin of victory, quality of opponent, and gives extra weight to conference championship games and playoff games. The link shows how each game is pushing a team's ranking up or down, including the impact of last season. Generally it is very punishing to teams who lost to a team ranked well below them. Here are the principles: I only consider the final margin of the game and the quality of opponent. By the end of the season, I will only use this season's games, but I start using last year's games which are slowly phased out. Every win improves a team's ranking. Every loss hurts a team's ranking. (No quality losses) However beating a team much better than you improves your ranking more than beating a team worse than you, and the impact grows exponentially with the rating of the losing team subtracted by the rating of the winning team. (Or alternatively the impact shrinks exponentially with the rating of the winning team subtracted by the rating of the losing team). Best visual of this is the top 25 teams barely get a boost from beating FCS teams. Margins matter, but with diminishing returns. A win by 1 point has a rough weight of 1, win by 10 is worth about 1.5, and a 50 point blowout is worth 2. Any win in OT is about 0.9 After that, every game is given a force on a team's ranking, pushing it up or down. (I also have a tiny bit of "gravity" pushing teams towards 0) These forces change as teams rankings move, so I simulate ratings slowly being pushed up and down until they settle. Every force is equal and opposite too. If two teams play each other the force pushing the winner up is equal to the force pushing the loser down. Playoff games and championship games are also given double weight.

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