A couple of weeks ago, I presented another way to do team rankings. The method implicitly incorporates strength of schedule and margin of victory without having to do any hard math. For example, assume Team A hosts Team B and wins by 7 points. After adjusting for home field, Team A gets credit for winning by 4 points. The next step is to measure how Team B fared in its other 15 games. If Team B lost by more than 4 points in 4 other games, and won (or lost by less than 4) in its other 11 games, that would mean Team A had the 5th best result of the season against Team B. Therefore, we give Team A 5 points for this game. It’s that simple. You get credit for beating your opponent by more than other teams beat that opponent.

I don’t have a cool name for this sort of system, but I’m sure someone out there has been using this methodology for a long time and has already given it a name. So if you know it, post it in the comments. But I thought it would be fun to run through this method for every team since 1932. That’s what I’ve done in the table below. Keep in mind, though, that it’s only appropriate to compare teams who played the same number of games in a season. In a 9-game season, a team is obviously going to produce a much lower grade than a team in a 16-game season.

Here’s how to read the table below, which shows each team since 1932. It lists the top team in 2012, then the top team in 2011, then the top team in 2010, and so on, but you can use the search or sort functions to run whatever queries you like. In 2012, the Broncos ranked 1st in this system playing in the NFL (yes, that means I’ve got AFL and AAFC teams in here, too). The Broncos had an average score of 4.4 points. Denver had a win percentage of 0.831 that season, while playing 16 games (useful information when sorting), a 13-3 record. What’s the GR1 column? That means there was 1 Game where the Broncos Recorded a 1 — i.e., by delivering the biggest beatdown of the season (I also included games in this category if one other team delivered an equally-dominant performance against them). The Broncos ratings each week had a Standard Deviation of 3.1. I’m not quite sure what to do with the standard deviation column, but it was easy enough to include and might help you identify great teams that sat players in week 17.

The possibilities are endless here. You can type in “NWE” to see all the Patriots results, but also you can type in “IND” to see the Colts in just Indianapolis or “clt” to see the Colts entire franchise history. If you type in “-0-0” you will find the five — yes, five — teams to finish a season undefeated.

My goal here is to present a a ton of data in a user-friendly way for you smart guys to discover something interesting. I will make one observation, though. The ’99 Rams and ’72 Dolphins are commonly regarded as the two Super Bowl teams with the easiest schedules. That perception is correct: the Rams average regular season opponent had an SRS rating of -5.9, while Miami’s was at -4.3. But this method is much more impressed with the ’99 Rams than the ’72 Dolphins.

St. Louis has a grade of 4.3, which is the 5th-best rating of the 16-game era (and that includes a 13.5 score in a meaningless week 17 game). The Dolphins have a rating of 4.6, which is great, of course, but not extraordinarily great when compared to other teams in the 14-game era. Let’s take a closer look at the rating of each team. Here is the game-by-game results for the ’99 Rams, from best to worst performance:

In ten games, the Rams produced a top-three win on their opponent, which is obviously really impressive. The road loss to the Titans doesn’t look too bad, since Tennessee was a very good team in 1999. Only two of St. Louis’ games were “bottom-half” games, meaning at least half of the the opponents the opposing team played did a better job against them than the Rams did.

Now, for comparison, the ’72 Dolphins.

It looks pretty good, but remember this was in the fourteen game era. A 14-point road win against Buffalo that year was essentially average, and a 1-point home win against the Bills was bad. There were three “bottom-half” games for Miami, and only four of the 14 games were top-three performances.

This is splitting hairs, of course, but it’s interesting. I’ve heard several members of those Dolphins say that the ’73 team was better. Well, this system would agree, giving those Dolphins an average grade of 4.1.

Anyway, I’ll let you guys run with it now.