Welcome to the COSMOS Rankings, created by me, Jeff Sharon. I’m a college journalism and production teacher, writer and editor, and public address announcer for UCF Football and Men’s Basketball.
This is an ongoing personal experiment in something I’ve always been curious about: measuring College Football.
Why do this?
COSMOS started as a simple idea: An open-source statistical ranking system for college football. I had the idea of creating my own many years ago but first got serious about it around 2017, when UCF, my alma mater, went undefeated but was frozen out of the College Football Playoff.
That began a years-long process of experimentation, hundreds of hours of data input, not to mention dozens of hours of YouTube searches for spreadsheet formula tutorials.
The result is this: the College Football Schedule Strength/Margin of Victory Objective System, or COSMOS.
By the way, in case you couldn’t tell, I’m a space geek, and I always loved NASA’s penchant for backronyms. Plus the space imagery of “COSMOS” calls to mind both Carl Sagan and my favorite mascot, the Citronaut.
FAQ
Why should we listen to you about this?
I’m not saying you should. This is my own personal experiment, a labor of love, and I want to share it with as many (or as few) people as are willing to look at it.
Will you tweak it?
Yeah, probably. I mean, I’m learning new stuff all the time. For example, I want to get a better handle on home field advantage, so once I figure that out, I’ll apply it.
My team should be higher. Why do your rankings suck?
Because I hate your team. Next question.