Of of the main challenges of maintaining historical data like this is what to do with forfeits, vacated games and other disputes. With the information on this site, there are two major things I want to accomplish. First off, I want it to be as accurate as possible in relation to official records as laid out by the keeper of those records. The other is I want to make it easy to view the quality of opponent that win/loss records consist of, what I call the second dimension of these records. This creates a couple of problems. First of all, not every query makes sense when viewing the official record, which may make a query pointless. Second, sometimes these two goals are at odds with the other.

The first problem was easily solvable, I created options on how the output is viewed. If you want to see how the results of the games played out, without being colored by forfeits and vacated games, just select the game result option. If you want to see the results with vacated games applied, just select that option. Depending on what you need the information for, you can select the option that best fits.

The second problem was not so easy to solve. I view the first dimension of records to be somewhat meaningless on their own. If a team is 10-1 it tells us they had a pretty good year, but exactly how good that team was is a mystery without more information. For instance, the team might be in a lower division, which would indicate a weaker schedule. However, what we really need to know is the quality of opponents that the team played. What I’ve done to help that is shown the win/loss record of opponents in the query and allowed viewing of who those opponents were, with breakdowns for ranked teams, bowl teams, etc. Also, there are ways to view opponents in categories and filter by those categories. This gives an easier way to look at the second dimension to see just how good that 10-1 record might have been. How that information is interpreted is a matter of opinion, but it gives a better idea then just looking at record alone.

The problem is, if I present the numbers as they factual stand (officially), the resulting forfeits and vacated games can make a mess of the quality of opponents played. You might say that a team did not deserve their record because they "cheated" to get it and therefore it should not show on the record, however, if a team beat a 8-5 team, it’s not fair to that team if you count that opponent as a 0-13 team. Even if they "cheated" the quality of their team was 8-5, not the 0-13 you apply as the adjusted record. Of course, if a team got beat and then gets credit for a win that way, it probably would be right to apply that team as an 0-13 team, as all their opponents got wins. Still, the 8-5 tells us more than the 0-13, as the team likely would have won some of those games even without "cheating".

Prior to recent NCAA actions, the affects of forfeits and vacated games has been fairly minimal. I’ve been able to apply forfeits and ignore vacated games without it having a serious impact on the results. Though the NCAA has been vacating games for about 20 years and over 10 years at the I-A level, there really haven’t been that many games and they’ve been among teams that were among the traditionally top 10 programs. With the vacating of games on a large scale by Alabama and Florida State, I’ve had to find acceptable solutions to these problems.

The more I thought about the quality of opponents measures, the more I realized that the relevant information was how the team actually performed, not what the official record ended up. Therefore, whenever an opponents record is displayed, or when queries filter by wins, lossses, ties, or record, the actual team record is what the queries will use.

On a final note, forfeits and vacated games do not become official until a school’s appeals is denied. I will not adjust records before that happens.