I'm a big fan of analytics, and you don't have to be on this website more than 25 seconds to get that. When given the choice, I'm always going to err on the side of an objectivist approach. I think that's really important. But output is only as good as input, and when it comes to this, I just don't know, man...
PredictionMachine.com jumped head-first into controversy by attempting to rank every national championship team, using a pretty standard method:
To build our National Championship Power Rankings, we "played" every team against every other team, using strength of schedule adjusted statistics, 50,000 times each and ranked them by overall winning percentage of those games.