Behind the Blog

I can't believe college football season sneaked up on me with me only realizing that the first game was tonight three hours before kickoff. I am very pleased with one aspect this years annual tinkering with the BCS formula. (It's something that's imposible to get "right," but I like to see them try.) They have gotten rid of the ordinal rankings on the AP and USAToday/ESPN poll components in favor of one based on the total votes received. I suggested this two years ago, but in a better way, I think. The use of ordinal rankings is bad because it doesn't reflect any closeness in the voting. The difference between 1405 and 1404 points is quite small but that is not reflected by an integer based ranking scheme that has those close teams ranked 4th and 5th. The BCS will use a percentage of possible points, or (points received)/(possible points). For the AP that's 1800, or getting 25 points from being selected first by all 72 writers. The coaches poll can vary slightly in the number of voters every week. So from the preseason AP poll, USC was ranked first with 1603 points, or a percentage of 0.891. This is an improvement, but I think it can be better with what I call the non-integer ordinal rank (NIOR). I say it should be 26-(points per voter). This still says that a team receiving all first place votes or all eighth place votes is still ranked 1 or 8. Look at the following table of the AP preseason top 10. Team Pts. Received. % for BSC Rank NIOR USC (48) 1603 0.891 1 3.736 Oklahoma (11) 1529 0.849 2 4.764 Georgia (5) 1480 0.822 3 5.444 LSU (1) 1446 0.803 4 5.917 Florida State 1291 0.712 5 8.069 Miami (Fla.) 1287 0.715 6 8.125 Texas 1236 0.687 7 8.833 Michigan 1223 0.679 8 9.014 The Ohio State 1005 0.558 9 12.04 West Virginia 937 0.521 10 12.99 The NIOR really highlights the closeness of the voting. The fact that is says there is a "first ranked" team quickly illustrates that several voters did not select USC as the best team. (The first place votes in parentheses.) Also, the fall off from the second tier of 5th-8th places to the third tier of 9th and 10th is made apparent.

Tonight on ESPN, they showed USC vs. Virginia Tech, but over on ESPN2, they pealed back the veil and showed all the behind the scenes production that goes on to bring you your college football. So, tonight I will do the same with my blog. The first challange was with the HTML involved with splitting the blog into two subblogs. My initial effort to put a vertical bar between them has failed. The Blogger.com input window doesn't seem to like the HTML I'm giving it. Here I was distracted by watching the game for a little bit. More distraction by the showing how the "1st and 10" line is superimposed on the screen. I cannot understand why there is all this blank space here when I insert the table. It is very frustrating. To celebrate getting this table to work right on the first try, I will take a break with a glass of Fanta. It appears that I just computed these numbers on the fly in the middle of writing by blog, but in fact, I had precomputed the numbers in a spreadsheet prior to writing to save time. I hope you have enjoyed this look behind the curtain. Unfortunately blogging is generally uneventful with me just sitting at my desk. Sorry about that.