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 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 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==