Methodology

GRID (Gridiron Résumé Index) ranks FBS teams by what they've accomplished this season. Like the NCAA's basketball NET, it combines two things: results (who you beat, who you lost to, and where) and efficiency (how well you scored and prevented scoring per drive, adjusted for opponent).

Those rankings are then used to sort every game into quadrants, Q1 through Q4, by the opponent's rank and where the game was played. A team's record in each quadrant shows the shape of its résumé, so two teams can be compared side by side.

GRID is an independent project and is not affiliated with the NCAA.

What GRID is not

GRID isn't a poll, a playoff projection, or a betting model. It is not useful for predicting the outcome of a game. It is a tool for analyzing the quality of each team's résumé, which (hopefully) is something a selection committee cares about.

Why the NET

Since 2018, the NCAA basketball selection committees have used the NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) to sort teams. It reads each team's résumé broken into quadrants: a win over a strong opponent, especially on the road, is a quality win, and a loss to a weak one is a bad loss. "How many Q1 wins?" is the shorthand everyone uses on Selection Sunday.

The CFP committee weighs similar things (strength of schedule, head-to-head, common opponents) but has no shared metric. GRID applies the NET's framework to football so arguments about who deserves a spot can start from the same numbers.

The NET combines two parts: a Team Value Index that only looks at results (who you played, where, and whether you won) and adjusted efficiency (scoring margin per possession, adjusted for opponent and location). GRID builds a football version of each, below.

Results Index: wins and losses only

This is GRID's version of the Team Value Index, whose formula the NCAA doesn't publish. Only wins, losses, and location count; margin doesn't. Each team gets a rating so that the chance of beating an opponent depends on the gap between their ratings (a Bradley–Terry model). Home field is worth about a 57% win chance between even teams. A road win over a strong team helps most, and a home loss to a weak team hurts most.

Efficiency: points per drive

Basketball measures efficiency per possession; football's equivalent is the drive. From every game's drive chart, GRID estimates how many points each team scores and allows per drive against an average opponent on a neutral field. Home field is worth 0.2 points per drive (about 2.5 points a game). Adj. PPD is offense minus defense.

Blowouts get diminishing credit. A winning margin up to 21 points counts in full, and each point beyond that counts 50%, so a 41-point win actually counts as 31. Displayed scores aren't changed.

Combining them

Both parts are put on the same scale (standard deviations from the FBS average) and weighted 50% results, 50% efficiency. The result is the GRID score: how far a team's season stands above or below the FBS average, roughly in standard deviations. Zero is an average season, and the national champion usually finishes around +2.5 to +3.

Quadrants

A quadrant says how hard a game was. Picture a fringe top-25 team (a GRID score of +1.03, about where the #20 team finishes a typical season) playing the same opponent at the same site. A Q1 game is one that team would win 50% of the time or less. Q2 is 50%–75%, Q3 is 75%–90%, and Q4 is a game it wins more than 90% of the time, so losing one is a bad loss. The win chances come from GRID scores and home field in about 6,300 games from 2022 to 2025. Home field is worth about 0.24 GRID points, so road cutoffs are wider.

Because the lines are set by GRID score, not rank, the rank cutoffs move with the season. When a few teams stand clear of everyone else, fewer opponents are Q1-hard; when the top is crowded, more are. FCS opponents are judged by their score in the same way. Quadrants use the opponent's current score, so a game can move between quadrants as the season goes on. As of Week 10, the lines fall at these ranks:

Early-season carryover

The NCAA doesn't publish the NET until teams have played 6–8 games. A 12-game football season can't wait that long, so early on each team's GRID score is blended with its final score from last season. Most rosters carry over from year to year, though a coaching change can break that. Last season's share drops each week and is gone after 5 weeks:

FCS opponents

FCS teams are Division I, so they count, just as every D1 team counts in basketball. They're rated from all their games but never listed in the rankings. For quadrants, each FCS team gets an equivalent rank: where its GRID score would place it among FBS teams. Most land in Q4, but an elite one can reach Q3 on the road. Games against non-D1 teams are ignored.