hoosiers

Fifteen wins over FBS teams. Eight wins over FEI top-30 teams. Four wins over FEI top-5 teams. No losses. No matter how you slice the data, the 2025 Indiana Hoosiers are the most accomplished national champion to date.

Chart titled "Best and Most Accomplished National Champions", a triptych of scatterplots illustrating the relationship between "best" (FEI) ratings and three versions of "most accomplished" (FEI-based strength of record) ratings for all teams since 2007. National champions for each season are highlighted. The 2025 national champion Indiana Hoosiers are separated from the pack in all three scatterplots.

There’s a lot of data visualized here, so let’s break down what is going on in these charts.

As described in the chart sub-header, final ratings for all teams since 2007 are represented with a gray dot in each scatterplot. The x-axis is each team’s FEI rating (see final 2025 ratings here, along with links to final FEI ratings for previous seasons). The first column of data that is represented in these charts is the FEI column. Note that the x-axis FEI data is common for each of the three charts in the graphic; if these charts were interactive instead of static — that is, if this was a single plot that you could cycle through three versions of — the dots would only slide up and down, not left or right.

The y-axis data, however, is different in each of the three scatterplots. The data is drawn from the same FEI ratings pages, but it comes from the “strength of record” columns (EWD, GWD, AWD data), three different ways to rate teams based only on win/loss outcome against the strength of opponents faced.

I decided to include a small visualization of what the entire scatterplot looks like in the corner of each chart, with an area of detail highlighted and blown up. The shape of each scatterplot might be interesting in and of itself, but this visualization isn’t featuring that relationship. Instead, it’s using it as the backdrop to feature comparisons of specific teams, national champions.

I didn’t want to clutter the chart with too much annotation, but I know this chart makes some assumptions that might not be particularly inclusive. It labels national champions only by year (more specifically, only with a two-digit code representing the year; 25 = 2025, 07 = 2007, etc), useful shorthand for people that follow college football closely, perhaps, but it’s definitely limiting. An Alabama fan might be able to quickly pick out recent championship seasons for the Crimson Tide, but I have to think for a second about which championships were won by Alabama or by Clemson in the 2015 to 2018 stretch. 2025 national champion Indiana is right there at the top of each chart, but it doesn’t say “Indiana” and you have to decode what the highlighted data and labels are intended to represent.

One insight that the charts are intended to illustrate is that there are several (many, of course) ways to answer the question of which team is “best” or “most accomplished”. And perhaps that will prompt some exploration of the underlying data.

whiteboarding

Welcome to the bcftoys whiteboard, something new here at the site. Aside from social media interactions, I haven’t otherwise had a feedback loop for folks that want to engage with FEI ratings, data visualizations, and more stuff that I produce. The whiteboard isn’t a fully developed idea yet, but perhaps it might be a place where a college football data community can form.

I won’t promise a specific posting frequency from the jump, nor can I predict how this space might evolve, but I think it will initially include stuff like this:

• A place to post my data visualizations, hopefully peppered with some additional notes and context for folks that want to dig deeper on the data and design choices that were made.

• A place to kick around ideas of data projects to tackle, questions that might be able to asked and answered in new and different ways, chart drafts to work through, and college football data minutiae to inspect and pick at.

• Possible musings/rants/takes? I’ll resist spending too much energy or time on the college football discourse du jour, but I know I sometimes want to flesh out, organize, refine, or even debate my perspective on data-relevant stuff.

If you want or need to know something more about the data on this site, let me know! If you can’t figure out what a chart is trying to communicate because it’s too wonky or unclear, speak up! If we find ourselves here one day in a comment section echo chamber of a whiteboard post complaining about how there should be smarter data-driven decision making among the power players of our favorite sport, okay, let’s hash that out together.

Drop a comment here or on any other post, reach out via email at bcfremeau@gmail.com, and/or ping me on Bluesky or X/Twitter, I’d love to hear from you.