Amid the annual rumblings about the inadequacy of the Bowl Championship Series rating system, a University of Iowa economist has proposed an alternative method for ranking college football teams.

Professor Stacey Brook said his rankings focus on a team’s productivity, whereas traditional methods of ranking have an emphasis on winning and losing.

According to Brook, the number of wins a team does not necessarily indicate which team is better.

“There’s a lot of randomness going into one team winning and another losing,” Brook said.

He used this year’s Wisconsin-Iowa game as one in which whoever had the last possession would win. However, Iowa did have the last possession in the game and still lost the game.

Brook uses a variety of statistics to evaluate the offensive productivity of all 120 Division I Football Bowl Subdivision teams, in addition to their defensive ability to limit the productivity of other teams.

Brook said that he hopes to use computer formulas in order to give a much broader view of the game, looking beyond the drama and emotion.

If winning is truly the only indicator of how good a team is, why bother extracting statistics, Brook said.

“Statistics allow us to observe things we wouldn’t otherwise observe,” Brook said. “It allows for more systematic analysis rather than focusing on anecdotal results,”

The BCS rankings are derived from two human polls and six computer formulas. The formulas together make up one-third of the rankings.

According to a statement from the University of Iowa, the BCS rankings can have a huge impact on universities because being picked to the right bowl can bring in millions of dollars in revenue.

Brook said that he is not necessarily advocating his own model to replace the current formulas, but simply offering a hypothetical scenario in which rankings are determined by his principle of productivity.

In Brook’s last rankings released Nov. 30 his top five teams were Boise State, TCU, Oregon, Ohio State, Alabama and Northern Illinois.

Wisconsin was ranked No. 7 in Brook’s system last week, compared with its ranking of five in the BCS. The Badgers are three spots behind Ohio State, situated just behind Northern Illinois.

Brook said he would prefer a playoff system.

“I would advocate for a playoff. We should allow teams to determine for themselves who plays in the national championship game,” he said.