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Maddening math BCS becomes more convoluted, less sensible
Updated: Sunday July 15, 2001 11:59 PM
College football fans love to talk smack, especially against their biggest rivals. Now, thanks to the suits who run the Bowl Championship Series, the typical conversation between a Texas and Oklahoma fan next season might sound something like this: "Your Sooners are going down this year. After we kick your butts in Dallas, we'll cruise all the way to Pasadena." "Not so fast, my Bevo-obsessed friend. Even if you win that game, our quality-win component will trump yours any day of the week." "Oh, yeah? Well don't think for a second you and your Okie pals' 'adjusted mean' won't come back to haunt you." At its broadest level, the BCS has been a tremendous boon to college football, invoking an exciting, pennant-race type feel to the last half of the season and creating the sport's first truly definitive season-ending event. TV ratings are up. Coffers are getting filled. Life is good. But where the lords of the BCS have alienated their public is by bringing into the domain lines like this one, lifted from MIT astrophysicist Wes Colley's 20-page Web site explanation of his college football computer rankings, one of two recently added to the BCS: "The derivations and examples within are based on basic principles of probability, integral calculus and linear algebra. Readers familiar with those subjects should have no problem with the level of material." Suffice to say, that rules out about 99.9 percent of those who play, coach or watch college football. To make matters worse, every time the BCS gurus tweak their three-year-old formula, they make it more complicated, but not necessarily better. ACC commissioner John Swofford and his cronies supposedly spent months testing the new formula. Yet it took reporters on a conference call less than 15 minutes last week to find scenarios that expose its flaws, especially in regards to the new "quality win" component, which rewards from 0.1 to 1.5 "bonus points" for beating a Top-15 foe. For instance (rankings hypothetical):
"I don't think they think these things through very well," said Jerry Palm, who replicates the BCS standings on his collegebcs.com site. "I think the whole bonus idea is bad to begin with, and with the way they implemented it, you end up with a really big emphasis being placed on a small part of the schedule." Not that this should come as a surprise. The conference commissioners who run the BCS are lifelong athletic employees whose backgrounds by no means equip them to oversee a complex math formula. Their only plausible means of, for example, selecting the appropriate computer ratings to include (Swofford said they reviewed more than 50) is to apply them to past seasons and see if the results jive with what actually happened. But just as these latest wrinkles -- undeniably a knee-jerk reaction to the Florida State/Miami/Washington situation last winter -- weren't even on the horizon a year ago, some new, unforeseen controversy will surely arise next year and merit even more tinkering. "The conferences have voted to continue the BCS through the 2006 games," said Swofford. "So our job between now and then is to make this system -- and I think it's absolutely the best system we've had in in terms of matching teams who should be playing [for] a national championship -- is to make this the best it can be." For all the considerable efforts to tweak the computers, it seems the BCS' desired result -- an Oklahoma-Miami Orange Bowl last year -- could have been derived just by utilizing the boring old AP and coaches Top 25 polls. Same with the BCS' first two years, when Tennessee-Florida State and FSU-Virginia Tech were 1-2 in both polls. Apparently, norms and deviations, quartiles and derivatives, aren't as reliable as writing the names of 25 teams on a ballot, something that has been working for the AP since 1936. "I think our group continues to feel that part of this formula should take out the human and subjective component that these polls gave," Swofford said. "So we think this is a complement to human and subjective polls." And indeed, ideally, a spot in the national championship shouldn't hinge on the opinion of a Pennsylvania writer who's never seen Oregon State play, or the Iowa coach who wouldn't mind seeing his buddy at Auburn get a shot. But at least then, we'd understand the whys or why nots. And we wouldn't have to brush up on our integral calculus.
Worth notingNew Missouri coach Gary Pinkel suffered a huge blow when top recruit Damien Nash failed to attain a qualifying ACT score. Nash, a consensus top 30 running back prospect, will now spend two years in junior college. ... Oregon is raising quite a stink with its curious proposal to limit TV stations to showing only 20 seconds of Ducks game highlights, meant to protect the rights-holders who pay to show their games. "They've confused the idea of marketing sports and news coverage," attorney Joel Devore, who represents the Oregon Association of Broadcasters, told the Associated Press. The group also contends the policy violates their First Amendment rights to cover the news. ... Nebraska received an important commitment from QB Curt Dukes of Newton, N.C. The 6-foot-2, option-style QB chose the Huskers over Penn State, at whose camp he reportedly ran a 4.43 40. Can you say Eric Crouch II? ... North Carolina coach John Bunting is already preparing for when QB Ronald Curry graduates after this season. He gained a transfer this week from Chris Stephens, who spent the past two seasons under Steve Spurrier at Florida.CNNSI.com's Stewart Mandel will offer his latest Offseason Beat notes regularly from now till Kickoff 2001. If you have questions, comments, ideas or scoops for the Beat, click here.
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