This man is Wesley N. Colley. He is the creator of the Colley Matrix Method, which is novel in that it uses wins and losses to create a retrodictive ranking for college football teams. A retrodictive ranking, simply put, is one which awards teams based only on what happened in the past. It's like the AP Poll in that it awards wins and strength of schedule.

You might be saying, "of course! Every rating system can only see what's happened in the past. What else are you gonna do, look into the future?" What I mean is that some ratings systems try to predict the future. The Colley Matrix and the AP Poll grade the past. With that being said, it's a good selector of who might deserve bowl bids, high rankings in the AP Poll... it was good enough, in fact, that it was part of the BCS System. It was also an NCAA-designated "major selector," which meant that even if you didn't win the college football playoff, if the Colley Matrix (or any other major selector, for that mattter) selected you as their end-of-season No. 1 team, you could claim the championship.

This is how the University of Central Florida has a national championship. They were the only undefeated team by the end of the 2017 season, posting a perfect record of 13-0. Hence, the Colley Matrix had them as champions. It's not that simple, of course -- dimwitted pundits on the internet may suggest that the Colley Matrix was so simple that it just didn't consider strength of schedule at all. Or that it just used plain winning percentage. It's just that in Colley's own way of defining the vague and nebulous metric of strength of schedule, the undefeated record posted by the Knights was just enough to be rated as better than the Crimson Tide.

The whole situation that evolved from this pissed me off to no end, and hence, I started making retrodictive rankings to try and see who really won the 2017 season. I would shift toward a more margin-of-victory dependent approach, and then back to a more win-loss based approach. Sometimes it would say Alabama, then UCF, then (this really made me blow a gasket) Wisconsin. The end result was that I saw there was no good answer. The metrics of "deservedness," "retrodictive quality," and "strength of schedule" are all very poorly defined, and the manners in which they should be weighted are not even touched upon in the mainstream media.

So with that being said, I abandoned the search for retrodictive ratings and started creating power ratings. It was, in my opinion, a vastly more rewarding endeavor: seldom does one love a game they'll never play enough to write thousands upon thousands of lines of code.