Ranking 40 Years of BYU Football

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to reveal my rankings of the past 40 BYU football seasons (since 1972); call it the modern era of BYU football (or since LaVell). I did a similar thing last year, ranking every QB season since 1974.

This is a mix of qualitative and quantitative. I mainly considered the following:

• Winning. As Charlie Sheen might say, it's about winning.
• Quality. I used several things to measure this, including Sports-Reference.com's SRS* rating, which takes into account strength of schedule and average point differentiation. I also looked at opponents winning percentage and point differentials to get a good feel for how good each team really was.
• Impact. Teams got bonus points (and by points, I mean consideration in my head) for things like playing in a major bowl, being ranked highly, etc.
• Versus. If all else failed, I did the ridiculous mental exercise of pitting the two teams against each other deciding who would win.
  

As I mentioned, this is a highly qualitative exercise. Readers will likely disagree with many of my rankings, which is really the point.

I also need to give credit to the aforementioned Sports-Reference.com and CougarStats.com for being invaluable resources as I did my research.

The first ranking piece will come out on Thursday, the 5 worst BYU teams over the past 40 years. Any thoughts on the worst 5 teams of the past 40 years?

* For a full explanation, check out the Sports-Reference college football glossary. You could also check out BYU's team page on that site. Terrific stuff.