About the Ratings « Coaches

Overview

The driving force behind SSA is to objectively review and rank coaches and teams in college football today. We have found that the success or failure of a program ultimately comes down to the ability of the head coach and his coordinators to do their jobs well. To that end, SSA has produced a propriety rating system that objectively rates teams, head coaches and coordinators on the core statistics critical for success.

Head Coaches and Teams

There are many considerations that go into evaluating a head coach or team. First and foremost is winning. Moral victories may help you get through a rough season, but they can’t play a part in rating a head coach or team. While we don’t believe in moral victories, we do believe that some victories are better than others. For this reason, we leveraged a Simple Rating System (SRS) model to determine Strength of Schedule (SoS) for all 130+ FBS teams and 125+ FCS teams and have factored them into our ratings. Along with winning percentage, a coach/team can earn additional points for BCS/CFP appearances, BCS/CFP wins, conference championships, and BCS/CFP national championships. We take into account where a team ranks in offensive performance, defensive performance, and special teams performance because this reflects a coach/team’s ability perform in every phase of the game. While there are certainly other factors and statistics that could have been taken into account, after extensive testing and retesting, we believe the formula we developed accurately and objectively ranks head coaches and teams.
Team Ratings

Offensive Coordinators and Offensive Performance

One of the main components we evaluate Head Coaches (as mentioned above) is ‘offensive performance’. This is composed of several straightforward statistics, including scoring offense, third down efficiency, and turnovers lost. Additionally, we take into account relative scoring offense, which is the percentage of points scored based on the opposing team’s average points allowed. We also factor in point per possession, which measures how many points, per possession, a team averages. Finally, we factor in the SRS-based Strength of Schedule ratings to adjust for opponent strength. The idea here is the same as with head coaches. If two teams (or coordinators) are putting up the same numbers, the one doing it against better competition is going to come out on top.
Offensive Performance Ratings

Defensive Coordinators and Defensive Performance

Defensive Coordinators, similar to Offensive Coordinators, are evaluated on the ‘defensive performance’ portion of the Team rating system. The factors that go into this rating reflect the same factors used for the Offensive Coordinators, just on the other side of the football.
Defensive Performance Ratings

Special Teams Performance

Special Team is the critical third phase of the game that we evaluate to measure teams and head coaches. Many teams do not employ formal special teams coordinators, so we do not attribute this performance area like we do offense and defense. However, this is a key component of overall team and coach success.
Special Team Performance Ratings