Analyzing ‘Death To The BCS’ : Chapter Eleven

Our ‘Death To The BCS’ series trudges on slowly but surely. Just over halfway home in our breakdown of the book penned by Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan, a great read that explains in detail what a sham the current Bowl Championship System really is.

Our goal is to provide a Cliff Notes-type version of the book for those who don’t have the time to dive in, all in effort to fire up college football fans, forcing all of us to demand more out of this broken, money-driven, flawed system.

Last up, Chapter Ten : Diluting The Regular Season. Today’s read, Chapter Eleven : Nonsense Math.

– Back in 2006, Hal Stern “invited the nerds of the world to unite against the BCS, stating that it “posed a threat to the credibility of all mathematicians”. Stern wrote an impassioned plea to The Cartel in regards to their ranking systems that compose the computerized portion of the formula determining who plays in the BCS championship game.

“I am advocating a boycott of the Bowl Championship Series by all quantitative analysts,” wrote Stern, in an article later championed by Bill James, a godfather of modern sports statistics.

Stern, James and all others on board with this belief, began to question why the six chosen systems bother abiding by harsh and severe BCS rules. They wondered why computer rankings are not allowed to take margin of victory into consideration, as a 63-0 win is hardly the same as a 6-3 win.

– Jeff Sagarin, the most famous of the computer rankers, calls his BCS rankings the “politically correct” version and says they’re “less accurate” than another version he calculates. One which includes margin of victory, though The Cartel won’t allow him to use it.

– “You’re asked to rank teams that don’t play each other, that don’t play long seasons, and you can’t include margin of victory?” said Kenneth Massey, another handpicked mathematician, who provided a “better version” on his website.

“It’s a very challenging problem from a data-analysis standpoint. It does require sacrificing a bit of accuracy. It’s not the best way to do it.”

– The entire point of the BCS using computerized ranking systems was to provide some sort of impartiality, balancing out the two human polls.

– Computers count for one-third of a team’s BCS score. First time this formula was tried, the results didn’t jive, so the formula was ‘changed’ three years after the BCS was launched. There was another tweak the second time the computers failed to agree with the voters and a third fix when it happened again.

– Anytime the math didn’t satisfy the standards — propping up the big schools and stomping out the small ones — The Cartel altered the formula.

– “Stern’s analysis was clearly right,” said James, whose revolutionary work with baseball stats was highlighted in the book / movie ‘Moneyball’ and who since has developed his own college football ratings system.

“There isn’t a sincere effort to use math as a cover for whatever you want to do. I don’t even know if the people who set up the system are aware of that. It’s just nonsense math.”

– Ignoring margin of victory is far from the only blunder with the system. Take the actual computing itself. Every week, the six systems input scores, let the computers spit out the rankings and send them to the BCS.

Nobody from the BCS double-checks the rankings and only one of the six, Wes Colley, makes his formula fully public. That leaves five systems open for corruption with no safety net.

– Massey once admitted that if offered $1M to doctor his standings, “It would take a lot of will-power to refuse that, to be sure.” In a game so overrun with rich boosters and corruption, how does this system make any sense?

– The majority of the number crunchers for this portion of the BCS formula are made up of brilliant minds. Men who have earned a Ph.D, graduated from MIT, Harvard or Princeton.

But there’s also Richard Billingsley, a sixty-something from Hugo, Oklahoma who is a stress-management expert by trade and an obsessive college football enthusiast, but a man not even close to being a considered a mathematician.

A non-mathematician who uses a numbers-based formula to rank teams. A non-mathematician who uses the previous year’s rankings as a starting point for next year’s, even if a school graduates it’s quarterback, running back and middle linebacker, and loses its head coach.

Billingsley is unrepentant about using the previous season’s results. Not only do other systems not abide to this way of thinking, they also take into account graduation rates, recruiting classes and coaching changes.

– “I’m not even a highly-educated man, to tell you the truth,” said Billingsley. “I don’t even have a degree. I have a high school education. I never had calculus. I don’t even remember much about algebra. I think everyone questions everything I do. Why is he doing that? Does he know what he’s doing, a crazy kook in Oklahoma? I had a guy tell me in an e-mail once that I’m a crazy Oklahoma hillbilly. Well, it’s true, but it has nothing to do with my rankings skills.”

– A Dutch computer scientist named Martien Maas, who has never been to a college football game, but compiles rankings in his spare time, analyzed amateur ranking systems for their accuracy in picking bowl games a few years back. He assumed a success rate of predicting the correct winners would have been between 75- and 85-percent, while the computers barely chose 50-percent of the game correctly … yet The Cartel still deems computers “integral” to the system.

– The reason for banishing margin of victory before the 2002 season; the BCS didn’t want teams that beat up on weaker opponents to be rewarded for doing so. Never mind that the BCS was actively corrupting the impartiality of the system.

By mandating the removal of margin of victory, the BCS brought an issue patently tied to emotion — whether a blowout victory is right or wrong — into machines hired to be emotionless.

– In 2002, analyst Herman Matthews removed margin of victory from the final post-bowl rankings in 2001. The starkest difference involved the University of Tennessee, which blew a chance at the national championship game by losing the SEC title to LSU and finishing sixth in the BCS standings. It was the Vols second loss of the season, and yet without margin of victory, Tennessee would have finished second in the BCS — ahead of one-loss teams from Nebraska and Oregon — and faced Miami in the national championship game.

“That’s really suspect,” Matthews told the Knoxville News Sentinel. “The Tennessee slaughtered Michigan (in the Citrus Bowl), but the Vols would have dropped from No. 2 to No. 3 while Michigan increased from No. 25 to No. 20. That’s crazy.”

– “It’s about respecting and accepting what the math tells you,” James said. “If it tells you Boise State is better than teams that have the opportunity to play for the championship, what are you going to do?”

“Well, if Boise State ever finishes first, they’ll change [the formula] for a fourth time.”

– Tweaks that have taken place to date with the BCS formula; it’s original version used computer rankings, human-poll rankings, a strength-of-schedule component. and number of losses. In 2001, the BCS added ‘bonus points’ for quality wins. That wasn’t enough, so in 2002, it changed its quality-win formula and removed margin of victory.

And after USC ended 2004 at No. 1 in the AP poll, despite not playing for the BCS championship, the whole BCS system was blow up to de-emphasize the computers.

– The diluted computer rankings are determined simply. The six send in their twenty-five best teams, with the top one receiving twenty-five points and the lowest getting one point. For each team, the BCS drops the highest and lowest rankings to get rid of potential outliers, adds the four remaining numbers, divides them by a hundred to get a percentage, and averages that percentage with the one from the coaches’ poll and Harris poll.

– Both Massey and Colley have gone on record as stating that they are in favor of a playoff system.

– Next up; Chapter Twelve : Fooling The Voters (Who Are Often Fools).

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