College Football's Grid of Shame

Rachel Bachman:

It's easy to judge a college-football program from afar. To properly praise and ridicule, one needs hard data.

As the season begins Thursday, The Wall Street Journal presents its third annual grid of shame. Because college football is as much about scandal as it is about sport, we have rated all 125 major-college teams on two axes: how good they're projected to be on the field and how shameful their activities have been off of it.

The ratings are systematic. To rank the teams' 2013 prospects, we calculated a composite of four 1-through-125 rankings: Athlon, Lindy's, the Orlando Sentinel and football guru Phil Steele. The shame component is based on five categories: each team's four-year Academic Progress Rate (APR) figure, the metric the NCAA uses to assess academic performance; recent history of major violations and probation; percentage of athletic-department revenues subsidized by student fees; number of player arrests in the off-season, and a purely subjective, overall "ick" factor. (Sorry, Penn State.)

The results show how loudly you should crow at your next tailgate--or whether you should consider using your diploma as a coaster.

This year, the geeks are taking over. Academic stalwarts Stanford and Northwestern rank among the winners. So does Notre Dame--although the Manti Te'o fake-girlfriend fiasco sent the Fighting Irish plummeting toward the "embarrassing" axis.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 29, 2013 12:21 AM
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