I’ve been trying to put my own SRS ratings together and something just isn’t working. I understand the concept (and have relatively good excel skills) but it seems that when I force through the circular reference, the iterations just keep resulting in higher and higher SOS. I don’t know if any of you had this issue when you first put yours together but would definitely appreciate any insights here.

For reference, I used the full 2013 schedule and used the capped SRS that College-Football Reference uses (MOV under 7 pts is 7 pts, anything between 7 and 24 is what it is, and any MOV above 24 is 24). I can easily sync up to their MOV calculation (essentially SRS – SOS, because they don’t show the actual MOV), but when I link up so make the model circular, the SOS just keeps going up and never converges.

Thanks in advance!

Sorry my fault – it’s possibly a European term (?? – I’m from the UK) – by fixtures I mean game/schedule. When I first did the SRS, I laid all of the games out as Team A vs Team B, but to get the SRS to converge you also need to allow for Team B vs Team A (so the same game has to appear on your worksheet twice). If you do it the Winston method, you only need to lay the game out once (as you use Excel’s Solver to set-up the iterative process, as opposed to how you can do the SRS, which you could also do using a matrix in Excel – I think – pretty much in the way Massey explained in his thesis paper on rankings).

I’ve also had a few other thoughts on the play-offs. I still think Auburn gets there, but if Alabama also gets there one of them would have to drop at least one game, and then is it going to come down to style points effectively (in terms of how you rank the one loss teams, or is it solely by BCS?). There’s no way you are getting four 12-0 teams (but possibly 2 or 3) so I can see there being issues on who gets in and who doesn’t. I haven’t looked at the schedules enough to figure this all out, but I’m figuring the play-offs can definately have two teams from the same conference (even if one has one loss, providing that the one loss team is good enough).