Indiana Just Won It All. Its Four-Year Average Still Says .500.
A rolling average is supposed to reveal where a program is really headed — to smooth away the lucky bounces and show the underlying trend. But an average is a rearview mirror: it confirms a rise only after the rise is over. To catch a program in the act, you need its slope. To catch it early, you need the bend in the slope. Here is who is actually moving.
The question: Indiana just won the national title. Its four-year average still reads .500. Which number tells us where the program is actually going?
The answer: neither, on its own. A level tells you where a program has been. A slope tells you where it is. Only the bend in the slope tells you where it is headed.
Why that is surprising. A rolling average is sold as the sober, trend-revealing number. It is a rearview mirror; it confirms a rise only after the rise is over.
Indiana won the national championship. The Hoosiers went unbeaten, the best team in the country, the story of the season — and their four-year average still says .500.
That is the trap in reading a program by its level, and it points us at a better way to look. Three different questions hide inside “how good is this team?”
Who’s rising, who’s falling
Slope alone already tells a story the standings hide. Over the last six years the clearest risers are Ole Miss, climbing steadily under Lane Kiffin from the low .400s toward the high .700s; Tennessee, back among the living; Illinois, doubling its win rate; and the great redemption arc of the sport, Kansas — a program whose rolling average sank to thirteen percent around 2017, the worst sustained stretch in major college football, and has since clawed all the way back toward even. The steepest fallers are led by Stanford, whose line is a near-perfect mountain: up to an eighty-five-percent peak in the Harbaugh-and-Shaw years, then a decade-long slide to the high .200s, one of the sharpest declines a blue-blood-adjacent program has managed in the modern era.
The twist the eye test gets backwards
Now watch the part that should make a Nebraska fan sit up. Ask a hundred people whether the Cornhuskers are rising or falling and we can guess the answer we would get.
Which is why we need all three. Velocity tells us which way a team is moving right now; acceleration tells us whether that motion is about to continue or run out.
Level tells you where a program has been. Slope tells you where it is. Only the bend tells you where it’s going.
CFB Roadmap, Part VWhat to take home: where the coach shows up
This is also, quietly, the honest answer to the oldest question in the sport: how long before you know what you have in a hire. You do not read it in the record, which is noisy, or in the rolling average, which lags by design. You read it in the bend. Curt Cignetti walked into Bloomington and put a vertical kink in a line that had been flat for two decades — the signal was there in Year One, long before the average admitted it. Lance Leipold’s turn at Kansas took three years to gather but shows up the same way, as a curve that stops falling and starts to climb. A good hire does not announce itself in the level for years. It announces itself, immediately, in the second derivative — which is exactly where a patient fan, and an honest statistic, should be looking.
Notes & sources
Trajectories are each program’s four-year rolling regular-season winning percentage, from season records via CollegeFootballData, over 2006–2025 (the rolling window reaches back to 2003). The analysis covers programs that have been in the top division continuously across the window, so recent arrivals from the lower division are excluded to avoid transition artifacts. “Slope” is the linear trend of the rolling average over the last six seasons; “acceleration” compares the most recent slope to the prior one.
Indiana’s raw win rate ran roughly .33, .25, .85, and a perfect 2025, so its four-year average sits near .60 despite the title — the lag described above. Kansas’ rolling average bottomed near 13% around 2017; Stanford peaked near 85% in the early 2010s before its decline; Nebraska’s recent slope reversal is the largest among long-standing programs. Figures rounded. This piece extends the newsletter’s earlier work on rates of change; see the archive for the companion pieces on regression and on acceleration as a metric.
