How the Bully Index works
The Bully Index ranks every FBS team on one question: who beats the winners and avoids losing to the losers? No polls, no committee, no margin of victory. Just who you beat and who beat you.
The problem it solves
A win-loss record treats every win the same. Beating an unbeaten rival and beating a winless team both count as one win. Polls fix that with opinion. The Bully Index fixes it with the opponents' own records, so a win is worth exactly what the team you beat has proven to be worth.
Scoring a game
- When you win, you earn assets equal to the opponent's wins. Beat a team that is 8-2 and that win is worth 8.
- When you lose, you take on liabilities equal to the opponent's losses. Lose to a team that is 2-8 and that loss costs 8.
- Your Bully score is assets minus liabilities, divided by the games you have played. Dividing by games keeps a team with 10 games from outscoring a team with 8 games on volume alone.
- Ties on Bully score break on win margin: wins minus losses.
Example. Your team is 3-1. You beat teams that are now 6-1, 4-3, and 2-5, and you lost to a team that is 5-2.
Assets: 6 + 4 + 2 = 12. Liabilities: 2. Bully record 12-2. Bully score (12 − 2) ÷ 4 = 2.50.
An opponent's record means its record right now against FBS teams, including its game against you. Beating a good team costs that team a loss, which is one more liability for everyone that team beats later.
Values change all season
Nothing is locked in when a game ends. A September win over a team that goes on to 10-2 grows to 10 assets by November. A loss to a team that keeps losing keeps getting more expensive. This is the point: the standings reflect what your opponents turned out to be, not what they looked like on the schedule in August.
It also means the early weeks are noisy. After one game, every winner is tied at zero because nobody they beat has won anything yet. The standings sort themselves out by the middle of the season.
Reading the standings
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Rank | Position by Bully score. Tied teams share a rank. |
| Move | Change from the previous week's rank. |
| Record | Wins and losses against FBS opponents only. |
| Bully score | (Assets − liabilities) ÷ games played. |
| Bully record | Assets and liabilities written as a record, for example 60-0. |
| GP | FBS games played. |
The gold line marks the top 12, the size of the College Football Playoff field. The second line marks the top 25. Teams that have not played an FBS game yet sit at the bottom.
Team detail
Select any team to expand it. You will see its best win, the beaten opponent with the most wins, its worst loss, the winning opponent with the most losses, and every game with the opponent's current record and what that game is worth today.
Conference strength
The Conferences page asks which league is actually the toughest. Games inside a conference cannot answer that, because every conference win is also a conference loss. So each conference is scored only on games against other conferences, using the same rule: a win earns the opponent's wins, a loss costs the opponent's losses, divided by out-of-conference games played.
Independents are grouped as their own row, so all of their games count.
Game value
The Game value page looks ahead. For every FBS game in a week it shows, using records entering that week, what each side stands to gain with a win and lose with a loss. Stakes adds both sides' win values, which puts the games that will move the standings most at the top. It is the page to open on Saturday morning.
Questions
- Does margin of victory matter?
- No. A one-point win and a blowout are the same win. The only inputs are who won and the opponents' records.
- What about games against FCS teams?
- They are left out completely. They add no assets, no liabilities, and no games played, and they do not appear in the Record column. A win over an FCS team neither helps nor hurts.
- What if two teams play twice?
- Each game counts on its own. Beat a team twice and you earn its wins twice.
- How is this different from computer rankings like FPI or Sagarin?
- Those systems weigh many inputs, including scores, and predict future results. The Bully Index only records results and uses one rule you can check by hand.
- Is the playoff line a prediction?
- No. It marks the top 12 by Bully score, matching the size of the playoff field. The real bracket is picked by a committee with its own criteria.
- When do the standings update?
- After each week's games, usually on Sunday. Scores come from ESPN.
The bottom line
The teams at the top of the Bully Index are the ones that beat the winners and avoided losing to the losers. Those are the bullies.