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Proposed rulesDoes NRR replace the committee?
No. Six published measures create a numerical résumé baseline. The committee retains judgment but must explain material departures; predictive team strength is separate.
What goes into NRR?
Quality-win depth receives 35% and schedule-adjusted record 25%; loss integrity and opponent-adjusted performance receive 15% each; win control receives 7.5%; conference champion receives 2.5%. Every win adds a small positive depth credit.
When must the committee explain a ranking?
A placement more than three positions from the published NRR order requires a written explanation. The model is an inspectable baseline, not automatic authority or a prediction of the next game.
How it works & full rules
Publish a résumé-first numerical baseline, keep predictive team strength separate, and require the committee to explain material departures instead of hiding judgment behind a formula.
Why change is needed
Selection debates blur two questions: what a team accomplished and how strong it may be tomorrow. When the evidence and weighting stay private, fans cannot tell which question decided the ranking.
Why this approach
Transparency does not eliminate judgment. It makes the judgment inspectable and prevents preseason expectations, conference reputation, or private adjustments from silently becoming résumé credit.
How it works
- National Résumé Rating scores completed accomplishment; Team Strength Rating is a separate forecast and never adds selection points.
- Opponent value updates as the season develops, and only teams actually defeated generate quality-win evidence.
- The committee owns the final order, but a placement more than three spots from the published NRR order requires a written explanation.
The tradeoff
Any public model simplifies reality and can contain imperfect inputs. Its code, data, sensitivity, and disagreements therefore need independent audit rather than automatic authority.
In practice
A highly rated team that loses narrowly may still look strong in a predictive model, but the loss does not become a quality win. Selection begins with what happened, not what the betting market expects next.
The complete rule set
What this part would establish
- Preseason polls have no formal role in selection, schedule strength, tiebreakers, or quality-win labels.
- Every opponent and the full schedule matter. Opponent strength is recalculated throughout the season using the team each opponent became; quality-win credit is awarded only for opponents actually defeated.
- A National Résumé Rating measures accomplishment and completed-game performance; a separate Team Strength Rating estimates future quality and availability.
- NRR supplies a public quantitative baseline, not an automatic selection order; the committee owns final calls and explains material departures.
- The public NRR begins with the first official CFP ranking and updates at every committee release; each checkpoint uses only games completed through the preceding Saturday.
- A committee placement more than three positions outside the objective résumé range requires a written explanation.
Published model
National Résumé Rating v0.56
Explore the NRR rankings, each team’s résumé, and the calculations behind its score. The model provides a baseline; the committee retains judgment and must explain material departures.
Detailed mechanics
Quantify judgment rather than hide it
The goal is to reduce unsupported subjectivity without pretending every piece of context can be automated. NRR measures résumé accomplishment, schedule difficulty, and completed-game evidence under one published formula, then forces major judgment calls into the open. A committee can still weigh context the model does not capture, but it must identify that context and explain why it changed the result.
The National Résumé Rating
Version 0.57 gives quality-win depth 35%, schedule-adjusted record 25%, opponent-adjusted performance 15%, loss integrity 15%, win control 7.5%, and conference champion 2.5%. Every win earns small positive, grade-sensitive evidence in Quality-Win Depth without a flat minimum. Conference Champion is binary: a league champion scores 100 and every non-champion scores 0, with no runner-up partial value. Conference names, brands, recruiting, and preseason expectations never enter the score. Final Opponent Value blends 45% official CFP checkpoint standing, 30% schedule-connected performance, 15% schedule-adjusted record, and 10% schedule caliber. Official standing remains the largest single input, but it no longer treats every credible unranked opponent as nearly interchangeable. Each game then uses 80% of the opponent’s current evolving value and 20% of a frozen pregame value. For a ranked opponent, its published pregame standing is the floor for that frozen share; unranked opponents receive no poll floor. The official standing curve distinguishes truly elite opponents from the back of the Top 25; unranked teams receive a formula-derived baseline capped below the No. 25 floor. This removes the prior circular risk of using one team’s NRR as the main evidence for another team’s NRR. The performance input moves two points for each point schedule caliber sits above or below 50, limiting soft closed-slate inflation without a conference label. Each win’s directly comparable Game Value blends 85% opponent-and-venue value with 15% game-level opponent-adjusted play efficiency. That game input subtracts opponent EPA allowed from team EPA, adds the opponent’s national baseline, and reliability-shrinks the result toward the team’s season baseline before national checkpoint standardization. It is distinct from the separate 15% season-wide Opponent-Adjusted Performance component. Opponent quality then enters one continuous, unbounded diminishing-return evidence curve on a gentler 22-point scale and game control supplies only a bounded 0.925–1.075 multiplier. Every stronger opponent still adds more evidence; there is no hard evidence cap or tier cutoff. Evidence units from every distinct defeated opponent are added before one smooth curve converts the total to the 0–100 Quality-Win Depth component. There is no first-, fourth-, or fifth-win coefficient: equivalent wins receive equivalent evidence. The nonlinear opponent curve allows one truly elite victory to outweigh two fringe Top-25 wins, while four Top-20 wins still receive four complete contributions. Road context is worth up to six points and neutral context up to three, scaled continuously by opponent quality. Every opponent is ranked nationally at the exact weekly checkpoint; cumulative Top 5, Top 10, Top 15, Top 20, and Top 25 win counts appear on the résumé card, lesser support is disclosed separately, and every evidence card can open the opponent’s horizontal résumé and the archived quarter-by-quarter game line. Schedule-adjusted record gives 65% to achieved record, 17.5% to wins above a fixed benchmark expectation, and 17.5% to schedule-challenge caliber. Every completed game through the checkpoint, including a conference championship, enters all three inputs as a full result. Conference-title losses keep separate low-risk treatment in Loss Integrity and limited record-foundation protection, but Schedule-Adjusted Record does not hide half a loss. A universal softplus upper-tail calibration centered at 80, with a three-point scale and 0.6 rate, lets exceptional undefeated records approach 100 while remaining nearly dormant for ordinary scores. The frozen 40% / 30% / 30% opponent-context graph remains in place, so the revision does not recursively change every opponent’s value. Ranked opponents draw 90% of their schedule value from the selected official checkpoint and 10% from national play-level strength; unranked opponents retain play-level strength. The schedule term blends 30% of the full slate with 70% of one smooth challenge-weighted average, then uses one continuous 12-point logistic contrast curve so elite slates separate from ordinary ones without a tier line. Every opponent counts, with no tier cutoff or counted-game cap. Scored opponent-adjusted performance begins with the national ridge estimate and subtracts one continuous, deduction-only soft-schedule credibility term. The same shortfall lightly scales Win Control, keeping an unbeaten elite résumé near the top of the scale without granting soft schedules a free pass. Opponent-adjusted performance fits every offense and defense together from meaningful scrimmage-play EPA across the national schedule. Loss integrity stays on an independent first-pass opponent graph; its continuous 1.2-rate exponential decay applies to the 0.45-power weakest-loss shortfall below Opponent Value 60, while no loss earns quality credit. A smooth two-point lower-tail calibration preserves separation among damaged résumés without imposing a score floor: zero remains zero and 100 remains 100. Quality-Win Depth receives a smaller 1.5-point version of the same endpoint-anchored calibration. The multiplicative additional-loss frequency rate is 25%. Loss game state gives 20% to the start of Q4, 35% to 6:00, and 45% to 2:00, while the home or neutral charge diminishes smoothly against stronger opponents without disappearing. A separate opponent-independent extreme-blowout tail uses the worst final or late-game deficit, with a smooth 29-point midpoint, three-point scale, and 1.6 severity-point rate rather than a hard cutoff. Every conference-title loss receives half ordinary frequency treatment and one smooth low-risk severity curve: a two-point base plus up to 4.5 points on an 18-point decay scale. The curve still distinguishes close and ugly title losses, while a title-game rematch retains 60% of the ordinary repeat-opponent charge. A separate standalone game cost converts only that game’s direct severity through the common 65-point decay and lower-tail calibration; full-résumé frequency and weakest-loss portfolio effects are not applied a second time. The exact résumé allocation remains a within-team accounting figure. When two teams have the same record and sit within one point in the frozen provisional résumé Index, a direct win earns a small 0.35 raw-composite peer tiebreak. That rule is capped, formula-defined, and visible—it is not a committee reorder. The six weighted measures are first multiplied by one universal record foundation—40% floor plus achieved winning percentage curved to 1.15, followed by a continuous soft-schedule deduction that rises with loss rate to the 1.5 power—making the actual record the majority input to résumé credibility. Scored performance keeps the full slate as its schedule baseline and uses one continuous gate to validate it with the two strongest national schedule connections. The same formula applies to every team, with no school, conference-reputation, or manual adjustment. The published NRR Index then remains exactly 20 + 0.85 × raw composite, and the unrounded Index determines rank. There is no school override, conference multiplier, poll reconciliation, or manual adjustment. Readers may test alternative weights privately without changing the proposal default. The public NRR begins with the first official CFP ranking and is recalculated at every committee release using only games completed through the preceding Saturday.
A distinct strength estimate
The Team Strength Rating asks how good a team is likely to be next and may weigh current availability, recent performance, and validated predictive efficiency. NRR’s opponent-adjusted performance is different: it describes completed plays only. An injury does not erase completed wins in the résumé rating, but it can affect the separate strength estimate. The committee must explain how it balanced the two.
Venue-adjusted opponent quality
The same opponent should not carry the same difficulty label everywhere. The proposal’s initial Q1 bands are NRR 1–15 at home, 1–20 on a neutral field, and 1–25 on the road. The public bands aid communication while the underlying model stays continuous.
Publish the dashboard and the disagreement
Every team page would show CFP rank, résumé rating, strength rating, schedule strength, strength of record, quality results, road performance, best wins, losses, and conference results. The public archive preserves every release, movement from the prior week, the same-date CFP comparison, model code, data definitions, recusal rules, and an annual validation report.
Current proposal answers
Decisions already made.
These are policy calls—not claims that outside approval or validation already exists.How much predictive information, if any, should influence selection rather than matchup analysis?
None. Selection rewards completed résumé accomplishment. Predictive models may inform broadcast analysis, scouting, or matchup preparation, but they do not add selection points or become an unpublished committee input.
What independent body should audit model code, input accuracy, and committee explanations?
A conflict-screened audit panel with data, competition, athlete, and statistical expertise reviews the code, source inputs, weekly reproducibility, and material committee departures, then publishes a signed annual report.
Safeguards
What keeps the rule honest
- The committee retains final judgment, while the quantified baseline makes major departures visible and answerable.
- Scoring margin uses a continuous diminishing curve, so every additional point changes the result by less than the point before it.
- Model weights and data quality are reviewed annually and tested for bias and instability.
Evidence still required
What outside proof must answer
- Which historical outcomes should determine whether the initial weights are well calibrated?
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