The number-crunchers keep low-balling Army, Navy and Air Force — about 1.65 points a game, every year

The most common way to build a team-strength rating quietly shortchanges the same three programs every single year, and it can't help itself. Hand it a recipe of recruiting talent, how reliably a team moves the chains, and how often it rips off big chunks of yardage — the standard formula — and it will mark Army, Navy and Air Force down for not hitting many home runs. Then it watches them outperform that grade in 24 of the last 29 seasons. That's better than four times out of five against a yardstick that ought to be a coin flip if the bias were random. The triple-option wins games in a corner of the field this home-run-hunting formula simply never looks at, so it never learns.