Would you rather the deciding vote to determine if Msu makes the playoff be cast by a former player of your rival or Jeff Sagarin's ranking system?
Hypothetical: playoff selection
- Thread starter mount lefroy
- Start date
Computer formulas are generally superior, as long as they don't have anything stupid in them, like completely ignoring margin of victory.
Yes, that's the thing about the BCS that nobody seemed to talk about. It seemed like a good metric, with all the numbers. But numbers are only as good as what was backing them, and that was the AP and Coaches poll. Everything came back to that, and that was based heavily on simple wins/losses and allowed for bad rankings inside the computer. Strength of Schedule.....everything....at its core it was all based on what a bunch of journalists and coaches (who don't watch the games) thought.
The absolute best part of this playoff is the fact that an allegedly objective selection committee makes the decisions.
I liked the BCS. Humans and computers together do better. A computer element makes sure humans don't get suckered by a team that goes 11-0 against crappy competition and 0-1 against good competition. At the same time, you need the human element to know that a team that goes 11-1 without beating anybody good but avoiding complete cupcakes is not as good as a team that plays 4 cupcakes but goes 3-1 against top 15 teams.
The problem with the BCS, to the extent there was one, was that sometimes there were good arguments for 3 teams being in the top 2. The BCS with a four team playoff would have given the best chance a shot at the championship every single year it existed. The only reason to move it to an 8 team playoff would be so that you avoid the arguments over whether an 11-1 SEC team should get in over an undefeated team from a weaker Power 5 conference.
You make great points, and I personally am in favor of the committee using the BCS rankings as a guide, then interjecting common sense. Because as I said in my other post, the BCS was only as good as the numbers going into it. The committee receives the BCS rankings, then changes it, but the caveat is that they must explain any changes they make to the BCS and provide the reasons.
I don't know, just my simple thoughts on it.
I have been seriously toying with the idea of making an app for the iPhone/ipad that would come up with an algorithm to solves the rankings with no human intervention. High scope pieces of the puzzle would include wins/losses, margin of victory, home & away(you could potentially get a higher game score for an away game vs if you were to play it at home) conference rankings(calculated by a degree of factors), conference strength vs conference rank(playing teams just within your conference) and mixtures of your opponents opponents scores as well (mostly duplicates of the just mentioned). All these pieces to the overall score would be percentages based. So for instance 70% of your total score would come strictly from wins/losses while the other 30% delve into the details so to speak, dealing with other aspects. This would provide a way for the unbeatens who play nobody worth mentioning vs the 1 or 2 loss teams an even playing field and really fair.
Of course the data wouldnt be sufficient enough to warrant a serious review until about after 5 weeks. This would give us enough time to see most, if not all teams, play one game at home, away, team from another conference, etc etc.
I would just give the app away for free on the app store but it would be pretty useful i think. The only thing is, i am not sure if would be legal or not to use images of the different universities in the app without their permission even though i am making nothing off of the app. (when i mean free, i mean free with no ads).
Thoughts?
Of course the data wouldnt be sufficient enough to warrant a serious review until about after 5 weeks. This would give us enough time to see most, if not all teams, play one game at home, away, team from another conference, etc etc.
I would just give the app away for free on the app store but it would be pretty useful i think. The only thing is, i am not sure if would be legal or not to use images of the different universities in the app without their permission even though i am making nothing off of the app. (when i mean free, i mean free with no ads).
Thoughts?
I too think that Archie wouldn't be a dick. If Ole Miss was #5 and we were #4, maybe, but I have a feeling he'd be trying to battle the "I'm not bias" card even if Ole Miss deserved #4. If Tim Brando was picking and Ole Miss was #5 and we were #4, I'd burn his house down.
Luckily we'll never get to that point.