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Posted on: September 2, 2016 at 09:38:52 CT

College Football’s Grid of Shame
As the season begins in earnest, we rate how good the country’s top college football programs are—and how embarrassed their fans should be


By Andrew Beaton
Sept. 1, 2016 5:08 p.m. ET
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In most sports, winning is everything. But college football, as its legions of loyal followers can readily attest, is not like most sports.

College football is often as much about scandal as what happens on the scoreboard, which means that every program must be judged on two separate and sometimes conflicting criteria: How good are they? And how ashamed should fans be about rooting for them?

With the season kicking off for most of the country this weekend, there is no better time to settle both arguments with The Wall Street Journal’s annual Grid of Shame, an exercise that quantifies how every school rates both in terms of playing football—and the nefarious depths it has waded through to attain that status.
ENLARGE

The Grid answers both these questions for the top programs in the country—all 64 teams from the five major conferences, plus a handful of others that belong in any college football conversation.

The horizontal axis shows how good the team is projected to be based on a survey of preseason evaluations. Some of these use the old-fashioned eye test, others rely on complex algorithms. That’s the easy part. What’s harder is what happens on the vertical axis—or shame meter.

We begin with cold numbers, a weighted calculation of academic performance, recent NCAA violations and probation, attendance figures, athletic-department subsidies and player arrests. Schools were also dinged if they have a dubious history with injury mismanagement—like the handful of programs involved in concussion-related lawsuits.

But those figures don’t capture everything, and no program demonstrates this better in 2016 than Baylor. How do you rank a school that mishandled sexual assault cases involving football players, a scandal so seismic that it cost president Ken Starr and football coach Art Briles their jobs?

This is where the “ick” factor comes in. When the numbers didn’t capture the magnitude of the problems at a particular program, we punished the teams that brought shame to their fans in a way that didn’t show up in any data set.
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At one end of the spectrum, there’s Northwestern, whose fans may not have high hopes of a Big Ten title anytime soon, but can at least be proud that their team has stayed squeaky clean off the field. They’re in the Grid’s top left, where grade-point averages might exceed win totals.

The big winner on this year’s Grid is closest to the top right corner: Stanford, an academic powerhouse that will contend in this year’s Pac-12. This top right quadrant is the Grid’s lone safe zone: an exclusive club for programs that are both good at football and have done relatively well off the field too.

But many of the top teams in the country, like No. 1 Alabama and No. 4 Florida State, can be found in the bottom right, where the football is strong but the program’s off-the-field performance leaves much to be desired.

Then there’s the place where no program wants to be: The bottom left. This is where fans and professors can clink glasses and agree to watch something else on Saturdays.

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com