Big Ten: Oregon Could Still Claim a National Title. Wait, What?

Big Ten heavyweight Ohio State is the clear cut national champion, right?

Well, yes, but another Big Ten school has a title claim.

Per the Wolfe Ratings, Oregon, not Ohio State, finished the season ranked No. 1.

This is despite the fact that Ohio State beat four teams— including Oregon handily 41-21 in the Rose Bowl— in the College Football Playoff.

This means that, since one selector had Oregon as the national champ, if Oregon wanted to, it could claim that its No. 1. We’ve seen this before, most recently with UCF in 2017.

It seems unlikely that Oregon will do the same, since it, you know, made it to the Playoff and lost by three touchdowns.

Final Wolfe ratings for the 2024-25 college football season are out. Oregon, not CFP champion Ohio State, are the top-ranked team.

Even though they lost in the tournament quarterfinals, the Oregon Ducks are one major selector's national champions.https://t.co/nSIK3M3ptL pic.twitter.com/orzPmbyU1y

— Freddy Airmail (@freddy_airmail) January 21, 2025

WHAT ARE THE WOLFE RATINGS, ANYWAY?

So what are the Wolfe Ratings, anyway?

Well, here’s how the site describes them.

“A lot has been written on how to rate football teams.   This is not surprising, because a good rating system has applications far beyond sports.  (A uesful bibliography is kept by David Wilson here.)”

“Sports like college football with short seasons and many teams are much harder to rate than sports with many games and few teams, like baseball for example.  If teams in a league play a balanced schedule, then winning percentage is all you need to rank the teams.  College football schedules are far from balanced, though.  About 700 college football teams can be linked by schedules, but because each team plays only about eleven games, there is no direct way to compare each team with the vast majority of all the other teams.  Using winning percentage as the benchmark for comparison doesn’t work.  (Was 2001 division III champion Mount Union at 14-0 as good as 2001 division FBS champion Miami FL, 13-0?  Each had a perfect winning percentage.)”

“A significant but hard-to-measure factor in comparing teams is sportsmanship. Running up the score is generally looked on as evidence of bad sportsmanship, behavior which should not be encouraged or rewarded.  But by the same token, ratings which used scores are generally better at predicting the results of future games than pure win/loss systems.”

“With this in mind, the BCS chose to use computer systems that use only won/loss data (and not scoring margin) to compute ratings.  We have developed such a system that provides reasonable results.  We rate all varsity teams of four year colleges that can be connected by mutual opponents, taking note of game locations.  Games played against club teams, junior varsity teams, or junior or community college teams aren’t counted.”

“The method we use is called a maximum likelihood estimate.  In it, each team i is assigned a rating value π_i that is used in predicting the expected result between it and its opponent j, with the likelihood of i beating j given by:

 π_i / (π_i + π_j)

The probability P of all the results happening as they actually did is simply the product of multiplying together all the individual probabilities derived from each game.  The rating values are chosen in such a way that the number P is as large as possible.  This is often called a Bradley-Terry model, and is described in papers listed at David Wilson’ssite (see Bradley and Terry 1952, Ford 1957, Elo 1986, Keener 1993).”

WHERE DID PENN STATE FINISH?

Photo by Matt Lynch, Nittany Sports Now: Tyler Warren

So where did Penn State finish in the Wolfe Ratings? It finished fourth, which seems reasonable. Other less-reasonable placings have fellow Big Ten playoff participant Indiana at 7, BYU at 9 and Illinois at 10. This poll also seems to give Michigan more credit for beating Ohio State than it gives Ohio State for winning the College Football Playoff championship. It has Michigan at No. 13, despite the fact that it finished 8-5.

Penn State opens its 2025 season against Nevada Aug. 30 at Beaver Stadium.