Resume rankings
Not who's best, but who's done the most: every FBS team ranked by how hard its record would be for a playoff-calibre team to match on the same schedule. The committee says it weighs resumes; here is one, ranked beside its own list. It's the record so far, not a forecast: each team's chance of making the playoff, which also weighs how good it is and what's left on its schedule, is on the playoff odds page, which uses this ranking to pick the field.
Regular-season games through week 7. AP poll: released before week 7. The committee's first ranking comes out on a Tuesday in early November; until then the comparison is with the AP poll.
Biggest disagreements with the AP poll
Teams either list has in its top 25 whose AP rank is furthest from their resume rank.
Ranked above their resume
- Oklahoma State4-1 · resume score 14.7 · schedule 0.7Resume #35AP #18
- Missouri5-1 · resume score 22.5 · schedule 0.9Resume #29AP #13
- LSU4-2 · resume score 12.7 · schedule 1.5Resume #38AP #22
Resume says higher
- James Madison6-0 · resume score 62.1 · schedule 0.9Resume #7AP unranked
- Boise State5-1 · resume score 51.9 · schedule 1.6Resume #10AP #23
- UCLA5-0 · resume score 73.6 · schedule 1.0Resume #3AP #12
Every FBS team, 2026
138Resume is how often a top-12 team, playing the same schedule, would fall short of the record, out of 100: higher is harder to match. Schedule is how many of these games a top-12 team would expect to lose. The rule under row 12 marks the size of the playoff field.
How it works
Each team's record is held up against a benchmark: the season's 12th-best FBS team, about the last at-large team into a 12-team playoff, playing the same opponents at the same sites. The resume score is how often that benchmark would fall short of the record, out of 100. An unbeaten season through a hard schedule can score above 99; a three-loss season usually scores under 50. Only wins and losses count, not margins: this is what a team has done, not how good it is.
Team strength comes from YardLine's margin-of-victory Elo rating, the same one behind each team's stock chart, built from every game since 2014. Opponents are rated as they stand now, not on the day of the game, so beating a team that turned out to be good counts for more as the season goes on. The Elo column is that rating's rank: how good, beside the resume's how accomplished.
Elo's raw win chances are adjusted to match a decade of results: rating gaps count 15% more than plain Elo says, and teams below FBS are rated 310 points lower than their Elo, because the archive only sees them against FBS teams, which leaves their ratings too high. Both are fitted on every game since 2015, so a predicted 80% is won about 80% of the time.
Regular-season games only, conference championship games included: the committee ranks before the bowls and the playoff. Games update every Tuesday morning; the AP poll from its Sunday release, and the committee's ranking the morning after its Tuesday-night release.