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Feedback requested: The New S&P+ page

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By Bill C.
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So I've finally gotten around to what I wanted to do before my 2015 preview series began: updating the rankings pages at Football Outsiders. I've updated the F/+ pages going back to 2005, but those were pretty easy. Updating the S&P+ pages is both trickier and more full of potential.

I want to share information that is actually useful to people, and on the S&P+ pages, I've now made the following changes (aside from the changes to the ratings themselves, as documented here, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere):

  1. Adding (and explaining) second-order wins.

  2. Changing the presentation of the S&P+ ratings from the 100.0 scale (where 100.0 was average, anything better was above 100.0, and anything worse was below) to an adjusted scoring scale based on the season's scoring averages and your place on the bell curve.

  3. Adding (sigh) a strength-of-schedule rating.

  4. Adding a limited but interesting Weighted S&P+ rating that gives extra weight to games late in the season and is designed to hint at how a team was playing when the year ended. The goal here is to give further depth to something like, say, Ole Miss finishing two spots ahead of TCU in the 2014 ratings. The weighted rating shows us that Ole Miss finished the season horribly (as our eyes could verify), which means that their full-season rating was derived mostly from how awesome they were earlier in the year.

Thoughts? Confusing explanations? Other potential additions? Let me know in comments. Since this is such a template-based exercise, I want to nail the template before I add all the other years (2005-13, which are currently still holding the old ratings and ratings pages). Depending on the feedback, I'll probably undergo an exercise similar to this one before nailing down the new Off. and Def. S&P+ pages (which are also currently holding the old data) as well. FEEDBACK WELCOME. And while I'm looking for people's responses to the page itself, and not the ratings, feel free to mock the ratings, too. Tennessee ahead of Florida State! Crazy, right????

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