College football 2019 season preview: Ranking the Top 100 players – SEC dominates

Methodology

I started CFB Winning Edge in 2018 with a simple idea: Develop a quick and easy way to assign overall ratings to every college football player, while eliminating bias and opinion as much as possible. It took a lot of time and effort, and plenty of trial and error, but the team at CFB Winning Edge has calculated such a rating for more than 11,000 active FBS football players across all 130 teams.

Those familiar with sports video games such as the Madden and FIFA series, or the sadly defunct NCAA Football franchise, should be familiar with our ratings scale. Called VGR+ (or Video Game Rating Plus because of the pixelated influence), our individual player ratings metric ranges from 59.5 to 100.

VGR+ attempts to capture three important aspects of each player: Talent, experience and production. We begin with the publicly available talent rating assigned to each player in the 247Sports Composite, or if a player was unrated by 247Sports, a baseline .7500 for Power Five conference teams, and .7000 for those in the Group of Five.

A quick aside for the skeptics: Yes, high school talent ratings include opinion, as well as some bias. Some positions are notoriously difficult to evaluate (offensive linemen, first and foremost) and it’s never easy to project how a high school athlete will fare in college. Some players are criminally underrated, signing as two-star prospects or even walk-ons and blossoming into future first round NFL Draft picks, while occasionally five-star standouts are hyped up to the point of being overrated.

However, the good folks at 247Sports, Rivals, and ESPN (the three main evaluation sites who contribute to the Composite) take their work very seriously and are correct more often than not. Plus, it’s not our opinion, it’s the collective opinion of a group of experts. Therefore, it’s a great place for us to start.

Once we’ve got our talent projection baseline, we add weight based on experience. In our estimation, a true freshman steps on campus at roughly 85 percent of his maximum potential. Therefore, we multiply his 247Sports rating by 85. Sophomores receive 90 percent, juniors 95 and seniors 100. Because redshirt freshmen have little or no on-field experience but have spent a full year on the practice field, in the weight room and in the dining hall, we multiply their talent projection by 87.5.

Finally, we add Production Points to the mix. CFB Winning Edge Production Points are meant to help an underrated player more easily meet or surpass his preconceived talent projection. Players can earn one additional point in the VGR+ calculation for reaching certain statistical accomplishments, or through earning weekly or annual conference or national accolades. Examples include 300 passing yards, 100 rushing yards, or 100 receiving yards in a game, 25 tackles, 5.0 tackles for loss, or two sacks or interceptions during a season, or being named Pac-12 Offensive Player of the Week, or First Team All-SEC.

Using a famous recent example, let’s see how it works in practice:

Baker Mayfield was assigned a .8384 rating in the 247Sports Composite in 2013. Mayfield arrived at Texas Tech ranked No. 1,029 overall in his class, and No. 42 among pro-style quarterback recruits nationally. By applying the 85 percent weight to his talent projection rating, Mayfield arrived in Lubbock with a 71.27 overall rating.

By the time Mayfield began his 2017 Heisman Trophy-winning senior season at Oklahoma, he had made 33 career starts (+3 Production Points) and had thrown for 300 yards 16 times (+16 PP). He was also Big 12 Freshman of the Year, a two-time First Team All-Big 12 selection, and Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year, totaling seven additional Production Points. Adding his 26 career Production Points to his raw 83.84 rating (.8384 x 100), Mayfield has already earned a maximum 100 rating (109.84 to be exact, if VGR+ was not capped at 100).

Also, though VGR+ is designed to take opinion out of the equation as much as possible, on occasion a player will impress enough to earn what we call an “Eye Test Override” to his previous talent projection.

An example is Notre Dame safety Alohi Gilman, who was an unrated player in high school and signed to play at Navy. After his transfer to Notre Dame, Gilman blossomed and racked up 10 Production Points as a sophomore. However, because he was vastly underrated at 76.5 VGR+ (.7000 x 95 + 10 PP = 76.5 VGR+) using the traditional calculation entering his junior season (in which he is widely considered a preseason All-American candidate), we opted to bump Gilman’s talent potential to .9000, which raised his VGR+ to a respectable 95.5 for a player of his caliber. We very rarely enact the Eye Test Override and almost never apply it to a skill position player who signs with a Power Five program out of high school.

We will gladly admit the VGR+ calculation is not a perfect system. Nothing is. Regardless, we’re confident our VGR+ ratings provide a solid foundation on which we build our Position & Unit Rankings, and our Team Strength Ratings (our overall set of team power rankings, which we use to project point spreads for every FBS vs. FBS game all season long).

Now that we’ve explained VGR+ as a concept, we can turn our attention to the 2019 college football season and ranking the Top 100 players in the country.

It’s important to note there are 154 active FBS players who have received the maximum 100 rating in our formula, and while that may sound like a lot, we’re still talking about the top 1.4 percent of the player pool. This Top 100 list was designed to include only those players who have reached a 100 rating in the metric. That means cuts had to be made.

Also, because we try not to abuse the Eye Test Override, some of the most highly regarded players in college football were snubbed. A trio of Pac-12 headliners – Oregon quarterback and top NFL Draft prospect Justin Herbert (95.84), Stanford cornerback and surefire All-American candidate Paulson Adebo (98.34) and top Washington DB Myles Bryant (98.21) – are among those that have been omitted. The same can be said for a pair of elite Big 12 playmakers, dynamic TCU receiver and return man Jalen Reagor (96.88) and Oklahoma home run hitter CeeDee Lamb (98.90). We were even forced to leave off a few of the top Heisman Trophy candidates like D’Andre Swift (98.46) and Adrian Martinez (90.81), among others.

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