5 new reasons to throw away the computers

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10/18/06

5 new reasons to throw away the computers

NCAAF

CriticalFanatic

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Lost amid swinging helmets, lousy administrators, miracle comebacks and some important baseball games ... the BCS rankings slipped below my radar. After taking a closer look at this week's debut ... computers are providing further proof they shouldn't play a role (at least those currently being used).

5 atrocities by the computers this week:

Rutgers is ranked 9th in the computers. Ahead of Texas, Tennessee, and LSU to name just a few teams that I'm confident would beat the Scarlet Knights by two touchdowns.
Tulsa is 20th ... ahead of Georgia Tech, LSU
Richard Billingley's computer says Tennessee is the 21st best team in country.
Texas is 5th in the "human" vote .... 15th according to computers
USC is #1.

Computers tend to look a little more intelligent after regular season is completed so I won't jump on them too harshly, but regardless of your own rankings I think we can all agree these are errors. So unless they include MRISports ... can we just get rid of these peculiar systems.

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10/18/06

0	The computer over at MRI works fine. :)

10/18/06

Eric

0	I've always hated the computers.

10/18/06

Seth

At first I liked the computers because they seemed to balance out some of the voter biases and out of whack rankings. The computers also didn't do things like make a loss at the ned of the year worse than a loss at the beginning of the year like voters tend to do. But the problem is each year the BCS tweaks the system based on whatever blunder happened the previuos year, and in doing to so, some computer polls are no longer used and new ones are in, and they've made some of the other ones change how the compute the ranking by forcing modifications like removing margin of victory conditions. This has made the computer ranking seem less reliable than in past years, at least to me.

10/18/06

fxdirect

Thanks for the vote of confidence guys. I was a little shocked when I saw the article and then read it.

Seth does bring up a good point, though at least three of the computer polls used today never included margin of victory in the calculations. In all of those I believe that USC is ranked #1, as you would expect given that their schedule strength has been one of the highest so far this season. Computers which couldn't easily remove margin of victory from their model were eliminated when that change was made, prior to the third season of the BCS if I remember correctly. That is how we went from 10 computers down to the current 6.

Sagarin is forced to use only a component of his total rankings in the BCS. That component only looks at the team you beat - nothing more related to the game. He likens it on his site to the Chess ELO rankings used to rank and compare chess players around the world. However, his full ratings do take into account margin of victory which is why if you look at his site, you will see that USC is 4th overall, a more reasonable answer, I am sure.

Since we are down to only six computers, I have to believe it is only a matter of time before they are weeded out entirely, or included in a different manner, such as counting as one of the voters in the Harris Poll, or something like that. I was planning to do more digging on this tonight and tomorrow. You all just beat me to it.

10/18/06

Seth

Plus the remove the high and low so only 4 computer scores count per team.

And why is USC's schedule strength considered one of the highest this season? I know they've played Arkansas and Nebraska, but they haven't played Cal, Oregon, UCLA, of Notre Dame yet. This makes it sound like by the end of the season USC will have far and away the toughest schedule. I would have thought they would be lower in the computers (even with out margin of victory) but improve as they hit the meat of their schedule. Now it looks like neither OSU or Michigan could catch them and if they get a loss they would fall into the top spot of one loss teams (in the computers or course).