Modern sports commentary and analysis can seem endlessly repetitive, especially in these slow summer months when we’re all itching to see August preseason camp and then dive into live college football games. However, one exciting part of modern sports analysis is the hunger for new ways of studying sports. College Sports Wire’s Patrick Conn has created a new college football metric: Sustained Win Rate, or SWR. He explains the formula below:
“I pulled the game-by-game data for every team in FBS and then built a four-part formula.
“Schedule-adjusted win percentage: This is a raw win rate adjusted for a bonus or penalty based on how strong or weak a team’s opponents were that year. The baseline is .500 since that is all a team has to be to become bowl-eligible.
“Recency weighting: This is simply a way to give more weight to recent seasons than older seasons. Why should the data in 2014 matter more than what transpired in 2025? Honestly, it shouldn’t.
“Consistency scoring: This is calculated in two different ways. One is a simple percentage of seasons over .500, and the other is a stricter version based on year-to-year volatility. I kept both because they tell different stories.
“Final SWR: The weighted win rate multiplied by the consistency score.”
Conn compiled data for the entirety of the College Football Playoff era from 2014 through 2025, 12 seasons in all.
Where does USC land? The Trojans are No. 18 in the country, generally consistent with what they have been under Lincoln Riley. It’s scary to think where USC would be had it not been for Sam Darnold’s two brilliant seasons in 2016 and 2017 plus Caleb Williams’ Heisman year in 2022. The data backs up what everyone can see: USC has not been an elite college football program the past 12 years (and frankly, going back to the end of the Pete Carroll era.
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This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: A new metric comes to college football: Sustained Win Rate (SWR)
Reporting by Matt Zemek, Trojans Wire / Trojans Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Matt Zemek, Trojans Wire | USA TODAY Network
