About MegaPoll
MegaPoll builds on the idea behind the Massey Composite ranking, which takes the ranks of FBS and FCS teams from many different rating systems published on the Internet and produces a composite rankings of each division independently. MegaPll was created to address a couple of itmes the Massey Composite does not. The first is that Massey uses the ordinal rank of each team in each poll rather than an actual ranking and the second is that FBS and FCS teams are combined. To the author, the second represents a significant flaw in many stength of schedule metrics. The college football regular season is short and provides only 12 data points on which to evaluate teams. Every season there is a large number of games between FBS and FCS teams. However, most rating systems either treat all FCS team as identical in strength or ignore them altogether. This ignores the reality that the tope teams in FCS are better than the bottom tams in the FBS and have proven to be competitive with mid-level FBS teams, even in the Power 5 conferences.MegaPoll uses only ranking that publish the rating of each team in addition to their ordinal rank. I then scale the rating of each team to its z-score (the number of standard deviations from the mean). The z-score from every poll is then averaged to produce a team's final rating. MegaPoll produces 7 different polls - FBS, FCS, D-II, D-III, and NAIA, plus a combined FBS-FCS ranking, and an all-division ranking. A rating is obtained for each team for every outside rating sysyem where possible - if a ranking system rates only FBS teams, then only an FBS rating is obtained. For ranking systems that include all divisions together multiple ratings are obtained for each team - a division-specific rating, an all-division rating, and for FBS and FCS team, a combined FBS-FCS rating).
As a result, MegaPoll is at its core a meta-poll. It takes the ratings from many other ranking systems (there will be more than 50 for FBS in Week 3) to produce rankings, win probabilities, predictions, projections, etc. This is done out a pure love for college football and for numbers, but if you think your team is ranked too low, it is definitely because I hate them, you, and anyone ever associated with the program.
Constructive suggestions are always welcome