Case for South Florida and Virginia over USC, Oregon and Oklahoma?

[gusmahler]

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View this:
(1-7) W 38-10
at (4-4) W 49-31
(2-5) W 47-14
at (2-5) W 27-24
(3-4) L 24-23
(2-6) W 20-13
at (1-7) W 38-0

compared to:

(5-2) W 28-13
at (5-3) W 26-23
(2-5) W 37-10
(6-1) W 21-13
at (4-3) W 35-23
(4-3) W 64-12
at (5-2) L 30-27

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This gives me an idea. I'm going to go through and list the current BCS top ten as "Team A, Team B, etc" with their schedules and results listed, but no team names. The game is to rank them from 1-10 without knowing who they are and see what interesting results emerge. If this sounds interesting to you, keep your eyes peeled for a new thread.

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This is exactly what the Colley Rankings (one of the BCS computers) does. ( http://www.colleyrankings.com/ ). It looks solely at the win loss records of each team. Unlike other computer polls, it does no preranking of teams, and does no forecasting. It simply rates teams based on their record and the record of the teams they play.

It leads to results that humans find odd. For example, the #1 team is LSU, over undefeated BC and OSU. The reason is that LSU has beaten 4 teams in the top 20 (and their only loss is to another top 20 team). OSU hasn't beaten a single team in the top 29.

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if it does no preranking of teams how does it know which teams are the top 20?

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In case you're not leveling:

Basically, every team starts out with a score of 0.50. (This is what I mean by the ranking having no pre-ranking--Each team starts at the exact same level). As the teams play more and more games, you get more credit for playing a "better" team (better meaning the team with the higher Colley ranking). Thus you gain more points for beating a higher ranked team.

http://www.colleyrankings.com/advan.html
http://www.colleyrankings.com/matrate.pdf

The end result is exactly what the person I was responding to suggested, look solely at the records of the teams each team plays. So you have

LSU
W (4-4)
W (6-1)
W (3-5)
W (6-2)
W (2-5)
W (5-2)
L (6-2)
W (5-3)

being higher than OSU
W (0-7)
W (3-4)
W (2-5)
W (5-3)
W (1-7)
W (6-2)
W (3-5)
W (5-3)