Win Dominance: A New Approach to Ranking Teams in Incomplete Tournaments

Ranking college football teams fairly remains a challenging task due to incomplete tournament data and the inherent biases in traditional ranking methods, such as polls and committee selections. While methods like the Generalized Win Percentage (GWP) Ranking have attempted to provide a transparent alternative to conventional approaches, they are not widely adopted and leave room for improvement. In this study, we expand upon the ideas of GWP by introducing a new metric that quantifies in-game dominance using win probabilities. Our approach values both winning percentage and the quality of victories—capturing not only whether a team wins, but how convincingly it does so—thereby offering a more nuanced assessment of team performance. Using College Football data, we compare our rankings to existing methods, demonstrating that our approach better incorporates dominance and schedule strength. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current ranking systems and propose avenues for further enhancement.