Projected Super Bowl Winner According to the Dickinson Football Rating System
I was watching College Football 150 the other night.
College Football 150 is a docuseries from ESPN that celebrated college football’s 150th anniversary in 2019. If you haven’t seen any of these episodes, I would recommend doing so. The show is well done and very interesting.
In the episode I watched – Bowls, Polls and Champions – they briefly talked about the Dickinson Football Rating System. The Dickinson System rated teams using a mathematical formula, and was devised by Frank G. Dickinson, an economics professor at the University of Illinois. The system was used to crown college football’s national champions from 1924 to 1940. It was the first rating system to gain widespread acceptance by the fans and media before the establishment of the Associated Press poll.
The Dickinson System is quite simple. It awards 30 points for a win over a strong team, and 20 points for a win over a weak team. A team is considered “strong” if it sports a win-loss record over .500; a “weak” team is one with a .500 or worse winning percentage. Defeats are worth half as much as wins, so a team garners 15 points if it loses to a strong team, and 10 points if it loses to a weak team. Ties are half a win and half a loss, so teams earn 22.5 points for tying a strong team and 15 points for tying a weak team. Dividing each team’s total by the number of games played results in the final rating.
After learning about the Dickinson System, I thought it would be fun to apply it to the Super Bowl LV entrants – the Kansas City Chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers – to see which team the system considers to be best.
After crunching the numbers, the Chiefs came out on top with a Dickinson Rating of 22.778. The Bucs came in with a slightly lower rating of an even 20.000, so it looks like yet another piece of evidence that the favored Kansas City Chiefs will finish the 2020-21 season with a 2nd Super Bowl victory in as many seasons. Then again, as Bert Bell famously once said, “On any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team”, so you just never truly know.
As always, run to daylight!
Randy