The Rest of College Football

[lineygoblue]

heh @ Les Miles.

He still gets it.

[Jeff Buchanan]

If anyone has a f'ing doubt about how the polls have the potential to produce highly unreliable results, making the BCS rankings worthless, this sort of exposure should settle it.

I don't know how the BCS can survive more of this kind of bad PR (discovery might be a better phrase). If it is being engineered by power players that have an interest in destabilizing it in the hopes of transitioning to some kind of play-off selection, they're doing a pretty good job.

[Jamie H]

Duh. The polls suck. They have ALWAYS sucked. How can anyone continue to claim they have any level of accuracy at all? Oklahoma State at #6 behind Houston? Va Tech 13 spots above a team that blew them out TWICE?

Pure idiocy. How does ANYONE defend this bullshit?

Polls should have NOTHING to do with ANY postseason. They are an entertainment gimmick, not something to be used to actually determine stuff.

[Hannibal]

Polls will have a lot to do with any post season pretty much regardless of what it is.

[entropy]

One day we will all look back and laugh at the fact that we allowed this to be the system that determined the Champion of the best regular season sport around.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Mizzou's Gary Pinkel didn't do the Big 12 Conference any favors.

Pinkel voted the Oklahoma State Cowboys No. 4 in his final Coaches' poll ballot, behind LSU, Alabama and Stanford. The poll counts for one-third of the Bowl Championship Series poll. Alabama beat Oklahoma State by .0086 percent to claim a spot in the BCS National Championship game.

Missouri will make the move to the Southeastern Conference next season. Big 12 Conference leaders made it clear they wanted Mizzou to stay.

[lineygoblue]

Just imagine if the Basketball Final Four were determined by "polls"....

[*JD*]

That was before they pulled out of the BcS, AP was more publicized back then.

FIFY

[Jamie H]

Polls will have a lot to do with any post season pretty much regardless of what it is.

They shouldn't. They aren't used in other NCAA sports.

[Mike]

Well, quantitative analysis is still used in some fashion. RPI, Pairwise, etc. I don't mind that human polls are used as part of the BCS. I just think the field should be expanded to more than two teams. If they use the exact same system but selected the top 4 or 8 teams to compete for the national championship, the chances that the two truly best teams get to play for the title increase exponentially.

[Jamie H]

Qualitative analysis is not a bunch of jackasses voting. I know basketball uses the RPI and hockey uses the pairwise. Both are infinitely more objective than the idiotic Harris poll.

[Mike]

Actually, qualitative analysis is a bunch of jackasses voting, isn't it?

I just think a balance of computers and humans is necessary to offest garbage models like Sagarin. Every selection of a playoff field in college sports will leave someone bitching and moaning. The bball tournament selects 65 teams or whatever and there will, undoubtably, be a dozen teams bitching about how they got screwed out of a spot in the field. The difference is none of them are legit national title contenders. ALL the teams that are worthy of competing for the national championship are included in the field of 65. The others just want the t-shirt.

Football is different in that they only select two teams for their playoff. As I've always said, it's much better to argue over who is #8, or #16 than who is #2.

[Jamie H]

I think a bunch of jackasses voting would be considered quantitative analysis. As in, get a large number of relatively bullshit opinions and average them out to arrive at some answer. Qualitative analysis would be a select few experts making the call, which is more what the basketball tourney uses with the selection committee.

I think. I haven't done a science lab in 20 years.

You are spot on with the major problem. When you pick 65 teams, the teams you are screwing over are probably no better than #40 or #50 anyway, so boo-hoo for them. When you are picking 2 teams, the teams you are screwing over may actually be the #2 or even #1 team in the country. You really have no idea. But if you were to take the top 8 (or maybe the top 16) you'd be pretty much guaranteed to have the top 4 teams in the country included.

[Jamie H]

Ok I'm dead wrong. Apparently qualitative analysis is subjective and quantitative analysis is objective. I obviously had no idea what either term meant.

So the RPI would be a quantitative analysis that could be used by the NCAA selection committee who was doing a qualititave analysis of who should get into the tournament. Except that the RPI contains personal bias in the formula, meaning it is also qualitative to a degree.

[Mike]

Exactly

[Hannibal]

They shouldn't. They aren't used in other NCAA sports.

Either some form of human judgement is used or some kind of arbitrary computer formula that provides no more satisfying results than regular humans.