How RankSlate works
Two components, blended. A results value that rewards wins by opponent quality and site, with road wins worth more than home wins and bad home losses punished hardest. And an adjusted efficiency: scoring margin per possession, adjusted for opponent strength and site. Both lean on opponent strength, so the rating is solved iteratively: rate the teams, feed those ratings back in as strength of schedule, and repeat until it settles. Same games in, same ranking out, every time.
The cold start. A results rating means nothing in week one, so each season opens on a prior: last season's final RankSlate, regressed a third toward the average to respect roster turnover. The prior enters the math worth a handful of phantom games and fades on its own as real results arrive. By January the rating is almost entirely this season.
Tuned to the committee, not to us. For men's basketball, the selection committee sorts teams with its NET rating, whose exact weights are not public. RankSlate mirrors the NET's published methodology and is re-fit each season against the most recent final NET, because the committee re-tunes its own formula yearly.
Football is tuned differently, on purpose. The playoff committee publishes rankings but no formula, so there is nothing to reproduce. RankSlate football is the same engine on football's terms: margins are capped at 17 points, because a 40-point blowout says little more than a 17-point win, and results carry more of the blend than in basketball. FBS and FCS are rated in one pool, so games between them count.
Football's preseason start listens to the polls, once. Transfer rosters turn over more than half their production from one year to the next (we measured 38% returning from 2024 to 2025), and last season's results can't see that. The preseason polls can, so football's opening prior blends last season's final rating half and half with the preseason consensus. We backtested that blend on 2025: it beat pure carryover on early-season games and on full-season agreement. We also tested returning production computed from player stats, and it added nothing the polls hadn't already priced in. The prior fades with the first kickoffs; in season, only results move the number.
What it is not. RankSlate is not the NET and never claims to be; it is our own rating, built so you can see the machinery. It is also not a poll and not a prediction market: nothing here is voted on and nothing is placed by hand. The one human input is football's disclosed preseason starting point, and it is gone by midseason.
Where it goes next. The same engine runs on any sport with results and schedules. Women's basketball tunes against the women's NET and baseball against the selection committee's RPI. Each arrives with its own backtest before it ships.
See the rating drive a bracket at bracketprojections.com, where the projection is audited against the committee's published bracketing principles every night.