re: By the numbers

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ASSESSING TEAM RANKINGS. To do that, we have to start by creating a way to measure what the rankings project for each team. Using the "star" scale in a slightly different capacity, I classified all 72 teams residing in one of the "Big Six" BCS conferences in 2013 (the ACC, American, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC) along with Boise State, Notre Dame and BYU into one of five "classes," based on each team's accumulated recruiting rankings over the last four years, from 2010 to 2013. In the name of comprehensiveness, I'm using the composite team rankings compiled by 247Sports, an average of rankings from multiple services.

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Big Six' Conference Teams by Recruiting Class
• FIVE-STAR: Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Michigan, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas.

Note that, since 2003, the eleven teams in the "five-star" group have combined for 21 appearances in the BCS Championship game, compared to one appearance by any of the 64 teams listed below. (The lone exception in that span, Oregon, just barely missed the cut for five-star status.) The only "five-star" teams that never played for a title in the BCS era are Georgia and Michigan; among the rest, only Notre Dame failed to make a repeat trip.

• FOUR-STAR: Arkansas, California, Clemson, Miami, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ole Miss, Oregon, Penn State, South Carolina, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas A&M, UCLA, Virginia Tech, Washington.

• THREE-STAR: Arizona, Arizona State, Baylor, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisville, Maryland, Michigan State, Mississippi State, Missouri, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, TCU, Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Virginia, West Virginia.

• TWO-STAR: BYU, Cincinnati, Colorado, Georgia Tech, Houston, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, N.C. State, Northwestern, Purdue, South Florida, Utah, Washington State, Wisconsin.

• ONE-STAR: Boise State, Boston College, Central Florida, Connecticut, Duke, Iowa State, Kansas State, Memphis, SMU, Syracuse, Temple, Wake Forest.

Over the same four-year span, those 75 teams played head-to-head 1,488 times. Here are the results of those games, with winning records in black and losing records in red:

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