Final Movelor Ratings and Rankings, 2022

Well, it’s over. The 2022 college football season is complete. More on that elsewhere, but down below, you’ll find the final Movelor ratings (and rankings, within Division I) for the 2022-23 season. We included all 261 teams, because in case you were wondering, Movelor would have Georgia favored to beat Presbyterian by 95 points.

We also included how much better or worse each team landed than their preseason rating.

What is Movelor? Movelor is The Barking Crow’s rating system, and it’s based off of wins, losses, margin of victory/defeat, and recruiting rankings. Here’s how it works.

Some notes:

• Georgia, Ohio State, Alabama, and Michigan all finished within three points of their preseason rating. They took some up and down roads, but they were largely consistent within their space.
• Because Movelor doesn’t change a ton season-to-season, this is probably fairly close to where we’ll open up 2023. At the very least, Georgia will almost certainly be ranked first overall by Movelor, and I’d imagine the top four may shuffle but remain unchanged as a body.
• Duke outperformed expectations the most, finishing rated 25.1 points better than we had them preseason. Behind Duke? TCU. TCU was the second-biggest overperformer, even after taking it on the chin last night.
• The most disappointing FBS teams were Colorado, Nevada, Cincinnati, and Oklahoma State, all of whom finished between 15 and 18 points worse than where they began the year. I’ll be interested to compare this to SP+ and other systems we can get our hands on to see if there’s a specific offseason input we could add. I know we were very optimistic on Oklahoma State relative to the market, but I don’t remember the other three teams there sticking out.
• South Dakota State outperformed expectations by about nine points and North Dakota State underperformed them by about nine points. SDSU finishes ranked 26^th in Division I, so no FCS teams in this year’s Top 25. Incarnate Word, Montana State, and NDSU finish ranked 63^rd, 65^th, and 68^th. Incarnate Word was one of our biggest overperformers.
• USC is only 24^th, still, with Tulane right behind them at 25^th. Movelor was low on the Trojans entering the year (now that we have transfer recruiting ranking data to work with, we’ll likely make some sort of update to Movelor along those lines), but USC was consistently overestimated by things like the AP Poll. They finish as the fifth-ranked team (by Movelor) in the Pac-12, trailing Utah, both Oregon’s, and Washington.
• Tennessee and Penn State, ranked 5^th and 6^th, are closer to the top four than they are to Utah, who’s ranked 7^th. It’s the SEC’s world, and the Big Ten isn’t—in Movelor’s eyes—too far off.
• Clemson finishes rated half a point better than Florida State.
• FIU, ranked 210^th in Division I, comes in as the worst FBS team. They’d be a 29-point favorite against Presbyterian.
• Finally, for the Saders fans in the room, Holy Cross almost caught Boston College but came up 0.3 points short. A few possessions, here or there. If that.

Here’s the list. If you’d like to play around with it, you should be able to highlight it and then copy and paste it into your favorite spreadsheet software. Appreciate you all.