Strength of Schedule and Conference Rankings will be provided later in the day.
Scroll to the bottom for notations regarding adjustments and a couple of notes for the beginning of the 2015 ratings season.
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*Before getting to the gritty details, I wanted to mention that this season is dedicated to the memory of Adam Cicco (1987-2015), a friend of this site. Any donation received during this time will help to remember him in some way, most likely through the Florida St. University Athletic Department.
The following list is a normal function of my formula, but it's still something I consider worth noting. If I don't adjust these ratings, very large negative numbers are produced by certain losses, and it gives too much weight to that one week. These teams have been given the minimum rating as opponents (not above) in place of their actual rating. These are only teams with at least one FBS/I-A win. More teams are added to this list as teams have more losses relative to (usually, the one) win.
Army
Eastern Michigan
Georgia St.
The following also had off-the-charts (weak) strengths of schedules that had to be adjusted: This usually is only an issue early in the year.
Florida St.
Georgia Southern
New Mexico
I decided to post a little more detail at the beginning of every season. I don't think many people will read this, but if someone does and it's not detailed enough or seems out of context, there is more information at the bottom of the left panel.
I will try to break it down further, but it is a little complex. there are three major steps to my formula. Step 1 computes the strength of schedule (SoS). Higher numbers indicate worse strengths of schedule, so the number I get is subtracted from a second number that is the same for every team. Step 2 is when I use the SoS to get an opponent's rating. This is winning percentage times (x-SoS). If the team has at least one FBS win, I then supply a minimum rating of 1 to that team. Step 3 is when I add and subtract numbers based on the strengths of wins and weaknesses of losses. I never alter Step 3. The first list above applies to Step 2 and the second applies to Step 1. As the season goes on, typically there will be no teams that need adjustments in Step 1.
I'll lose people here, but if you want to try to understand the math... Since losses involve taking inverse numbers (this is so that I subtract less for losing to good teams), if you look at a graph of 1/x (http://www.sagemath.org/calctut/calctut-pix/onesided05.png), you would understand that a number x of less than 1 can get ridiculously large. In short, one bad game can wipe out a whole season of good wins. Losing to a team with an opponent's rating of 1 does enough damage. It can make the difference of up to 60 spots this early in the year. Later in the year it could be anywhere from two or three spots to around 30 spots depending on where in the rankings an affected team is. It's a subtraction of 0.5, to be exact.