A new way to measure college football success has entered the conversation, and it comes with a simple name: Sustained Win Rate, or SWR.
The metric was created by College Sports Wire’s Patrick Conn, who built it from game-by-game data for every FBS team. His idea is to look beyond a basic win-loss record and account for how a program has performed over time, how tough its schedule was, and how steady it has been from season to season.
Conn’s formula has four parts. First is schedule-adjusted win percentage, which starts with a team’s raw win rate and then adds a bonus or penalty depending on the strength of its opponents. The baseline is .500, since that is the mark a team needs to reach bowl eligibility.
Next comes recency weighting, which gives more value to recent seasons than older ones. As Conn put it, "Why should the data in 2014 matter more than what transpired in 2025? Honestly, it shouldn't."
The third piece is consistency scoring, and Conn calculates that two ways. One version is a simple count of how often a team finished over .500.
The other is a stricter measure that looks at year-to-year volatility. He kept both because, as he explained, they tell different stories.
The final SWR number is produced by multiplying the weighted win rate by the consistency score.
Conn applied the metric across the full College Football Playoff era, from 2014 through 2025, giving him 12 seasons of data to work with.
USC comes in at No. 18 nationally. That lines up with the broader picture of the Trojans under Lincoln Riley, who have been steady enough to stay in the mix but not elite by this measure. The numbers also underscore how much those standout seasons from Sam Darnold in 2016 and 2017, along with Caleb Williams’ Heisman year in 2022, have shaped the program’s profile.
The larger takeaway from the data is hard to miss: USC has not been an elite college football program over the past 12 years, and the same argument stretches back to the end of the Pete Carroll era.
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