David Rothman (August 9, 1935 – June 12, 2004) was an American statistician, public policy advisor, and the creator of a computerized college football ranking system. Rothman was the founder and executive director of the Foundation for the Analysis of Competitions and Tournaments (FACT), an organization and computer ranking used to select

college football national champions A national championship in the highest level of college football in the United States, currently the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), is a designation awarded annually by various organizations to their selection of the best coll ...

. The

NCAA The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges an ...

recognizes Rothman (FACT) as a "major selector" of college football national championships for the years 1968–2006. The

Bowl Championship Series The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was a selection system that created four or five bowl game match-ups involving eight or ten of the top ranked teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) of American college football, including ...

, for the 1999–2001 college football seasons, used FACT as one of the computer polls used to select participants for the

BCS National Championship Game The BCS National Championship Game, or BCS National Championship, was a postseason college football bowl game, used to determine a national champion of the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), first played in the 1998 college fo ...

Education and career

Rothman graduated from the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, t ...

. Rothman spent many years working as a private-sector aerospace

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

for companies like

Lockheed Corporation The Lockheed Corporation was an American aerospace manufacturer. Lockheed was founded in 1926 and later merged with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin in 1995. Its founder, Allan Lockheed, had earlier founded the similarly named but ot ...

, Agbabian Associates, and

Rocketdyne Rocketdyne was an American rocket engine design and production company headquartered in Canoga Park, California, Canoga Park, in the western San Fernando Valley of suburban Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles, in southern California. The Rocke ...

. Through Rocketdyne, he was part of the enormous scientific technical talent pool utilized by

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

to achieve the Apollo program

Moon landing A Moon landing is the arrival of a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon. This includes both crewed and robotic missions. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, on 13 September 1959. The United St ...

. Through Agbabian Associates, he was part of the scientific technical talent pool utilized by NASA to analyze the mechanical structure used in the space shuttle reloading facility called the

Vehicle Assembly Building The Vehicle Assembly Building (originally the Vertical Assembly Building), or VAB, is a large building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), designed to assemble large pre-manufactured space vehicle components, such as the massive Saturn V and th ...

College football rankings

According to Rothman, he first began ranking college football teams in 1963 using a precursory computer ranking formula. In the spring of 1970 or 1971 he developed the current ranking method used for FACT. Rothman and his college football computer ranking system were discussed in a February 1968 issue of ''Time'' magazine. In 1991 ''

Sports Illustrated ''Sports Illustrated'' (''SI'') is an American sports magazine first published in August 1954. Founded by Stuart Scheftel, it was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twic ...

'' covered the bottom 10 teams on his list. At the time, the 0–6 Dr. Martin Luther College Lancers were ranked last out of 677 college football teams. Rothman appeared on television once, and presented once as a keynote speaker of a statistical conference in New York City. Rothman would eventually conduct his college football rankings as the executive director of the Foundation for the Analysis of Competitions and Tournaments (FACT), an organization he founded.

Bowl Championship Series

David Rothman's ranking system was a computerized mathematical ranking system fully developed by himself. It was unbiased and gained notice and popularity from Bowl Championship Series (BCS) administrators, his peers and the public. His system has the advantage that it was readily available to anyone who asked to use it, and it was nonproprietary. Rothman would have liked his system to have been widely used in tournaments in college sports such as basketball and football, where standings of teams were available and coaches and schools could reproduce rankings quickly. This system only used the margin of the score and the name of the team to arrive at a ranking. He believed that the BCS organization could rely on his system because it was adequate and sufficient, and convinced them to use his system as one of the computer ranking systems used in determining their championship game participants. In 2002, when the revised BCS rules required all participating computer rankings to remove any weighting toward margin of victory, Rothman opted to drop out of the BCS, rather than make the necessary changes in his system. Rothman's system by design was indirectly incorporating margin of victory. Rothman believed that it was evident that the success and validity of his system, which performed on a predictive basis, arose because he used the margin of victory as a factor.

FACT National Champions

The Foundation for the Analysis of Competitions and Tournaments selected the following

NCAA Division I NCAA Division I (D-I) is the highest level of College athletics, intercollegiate athletics sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in the United States, which accepts players globally. D-I schools include the major ...

college football College football (french: Football universitaire) refers to gridiron football played by teams of student athletes. It was through college football play that American football rules first gained popularity in the United States. Unlike most ...

national champions National champions are corporations which are technically private businesses but due to governmental policy are ceded a dominant position in a national economy. In this system, these large organizations are expected not only to seek profit but als ...

. The NCAA has designated FACT as one of its “major selectors” of national championship teams for the seasons of 1968 through 2006. Years in which FACT was incorporated into the

computer rankings.

References

External links

FACT College Football Standings

FACT Source Code
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rothman, David 1935 births 2004 deaths The Bronx High School of Science alumni University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni Harvard Kennedy School alumni People from Hawthorne, California American statisticians Mathematicians from New York (state) Mathematicians from California College football championships Scientists from the Bronx