New College Football Elo, Adjusted Scoring, and Wins Above Average Reports

I’ve expanded the 2025 college football ratings section with new ways to evaluate teams across every level. The update adds final Elo ratings for FBS, FCS, Division II, and Division III, plus Adjusted Scoring and Wins Above Average reports for FBS.

Elo ratings for every division

The new reports make it easier to compare teams with an Elo rating, a familiar system built around how a team performs relative to expectations. A result against a highly rated opponent carries more weight than the same result against a weaker team. The ratings move as results provide new evidence about each team’s strength and are expressed on the traditional Elo scale.

Elo ratings complement my existing power ratings, but they answer the question from a different angle. My power ratings focus on underlying team quality by evaluating adjusted scoring margin, opponent strength, and the full season of results. Extreme margins are dampened, and the ratings are iterated until they stabilize. Elo is more result-driven: it measures how much each performance exceeds or falls short of the expectation created by the teams’ relative ratings.

That distinction can produce different ordering. The power ratings give more direct attention to how decisively a team played over the season, while Elo gives another view of how surprising its results were given the competition. Looking at both helps separate dominant statistical performance from the accumulated value of beating the teams on the schedule.

The new reports are available here:

FBS Adjusted Scoring

I’ve also added Adjusted Scoring ratings to the FBS section. These reports separate how much a team scored from the quality of the opponents it faced, making it possible to compare offenses and defenses on a common, opponent-adjusted scale.

The offensive rating measures scoring performance relative to what opponents typically allow. The defensive rating measures how well a team held opponents below their usual scoring level. The combined report adds those two components together for an overall view of scoring strength.

Indiana leads the combined Adjusted Scoring ratings at 33.485, with the second-ranked offense and second-ranked defense. North Texas ranks first in Adjusted Offense at 19.161, while Ohio State leads Adjusted Defense at 17.123.

Combined Adjusted Scoring

Hover over or focus a bar for its exact rating. Click a bar to keep its details visible. Scroll horizontally to explore all 136 schools.

Adjusted Offense

Hover over or focus a bar for its exact rating. Click a bar to keep its details visible. Scroll horizontally to explore all 136 schools.

Adjusted Defense

Hover over or focus a bar for its exact rating. Click a bar to keep its details visible. Scroll horizontally to explore all 136 schools.

The three new reports are:

FBS Wins Above Average

The new 2025 FBS Wins Above Average report asks a different question: how many more games did a team win than an average FBS team would be expected to win against the same schedule?

For each school, I simulated an average FBS team playing that schedule 25,000 times. The report compares those expected wins with the school’s actual wins. A positive number means the team won more games than an average team would have been expected to win; a negative number means it won fewer.

The report includes versions with and without home-field advantage. The chart below uses the home-field-adjusted result, based on an estimated advantage of 3.091 points from 878 rated regular-season games. Every FBS school is shown from the highest WAA on the left to the lowest on the right.

Hover over or focus a bar for its exact value. Click a bar to keep its details visible. Scroll horizontally to explore all 136 schools.

Indiana leads the country at 10.646 wins above average, followed by Oregon at 8.381 and Miami at 7.786. Those numbers capture both achievement and difficulty: an average FBS team was expected to win only 5.354 games against Indiana’s schedule, while Indiana went 16-0.

At the other end, Massachusetts finished at -8.467 wins above average. The full distribution shows why WAA is useful alongside a power rating. Power ratings estimate how strong a team played; WAA translates a season into wins relative to what an average team could reasonably have managed against the same opponents and locations.

Visit the 2025 college football hub to browse all rankings, conference reports, standings, Elo ratings, FBS Adjusted Scoring ratings, and the new FBS Wins Above Average report.