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Billingsley Report

The Billingsley Report is a college football rating system developed in the late 1960s to determine a national champion. Billingsley has actively rated college football teams on a current basis since 1970.[1] Beginning in 1999, Billingsley's ratings were included as one of seven mathematical formulas included in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rankings.[2]

Unlike the other mathematical formulas included in the BCS rankings, the Billingsley Report was not prepared by a trained mathematician or statistician.[3] Instead, the Billingsley Report is prepared by Richard Billingsley (born c. 1951), a lifelong college football fan in Hugo, Oklahoma.[3] Billingsley attended Texas Bible College, became a minister and later a consultant in the country music business. He began preparing his own weekly college football ratings as a hobby.[4][5]

Billingsley has also applied his ratings methodology retroactively to select national champions for each year from 1869 to 1870 and from 1872 to 1969. Since 1996,[2] the "Billingsley Report" has been one of the selectors of historic national champions recognized by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in its Football Bowl Subdivision record book.[1]

The NCAA describes Billingsley's methodology as follows: " The main feature of his system is the inclusion of a unique rule for head-to-head competition, with the overall system consisting of a balanced approach to wins, losses, strength of schedule, and home-field advantage. A slight weight is given to most recent performance. The Billingsley formula does not use margin of victory, however, the Billingsley MOV formula does include margin of victory in the calculations.".[1][6] Analysis shows that Billingsley's ranking system typically strongly disagrees with other computer ranking systems and more closely resembles human ranking schemes,[7] likely due to the ad hoc and often self-conflicting nature of Billingsley's many ratings adjustments, such as weighting later season games as more important than early season games, adjusting win values by stadium attendance, forcing head to head victors to be ranked above their defeated opponents (but only until their next game), and discounting the value of wins by teams with more losses.[8]

Richard Billingsley is also the owner of the College Football Research Center.[9]

  1. ^ a b c National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) (2015). "National Poll Rankings" (PDF). NCAA Division I Football Records. NCAA. pp. 105–106. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-05-21. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  2. ^ a b "An Interview with Richard Billingsley". Playoff Guru. SC Publications. October 15, 2009.
  3. ^ a b O'Keefe, John (September 17, 2001). "Top Billingsley". Sports Illustrated. p. 26. Retrieved May 14, 2023.
  4. ^ Klein, John (August 24, 2003). "Billingsley's report a labor of love". Tulsa World.
  5. ^ Carlson, Jenni (November 27, 2013). "The Okie inside the BCS machine". The Oklahoman.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference FormulaChanges was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ "Playing the numbers game: the BCS computers". SBNation.
  8. ^ "In search of a national champion". College Football Research Center.
  9. ^ "Billingsley Wins Two National Awards". College Football Research Center. August 16, 2015. Archived from the original on September 8, 2015. Retrieved January 3, 2016.

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