SportsQuant 2009
College Football Rankings
(November 29, 2009)
The 2009 football season is nearly over and the final rivalry games were closer than many thought, especially since Texas and Alabama were more highly ranked than their opponents. (Well, not counting Florida's trouncing of FSCW, of course.)
The Conference Championship games remain and then the Bowl Championship Series. We've updated our computer models to produce our weekly 2009 College Football Rankings. Click for our latest the Rankings and Strength-of-Schedule analyses.
The SportsQuant rankings are based on determining how good each team is offensively and defensively (and therefore overall). Margin of victory is considered, as is home field advantage. Things are still early, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the estimates.
Another thing to note is that head-to-head matters much less than in the polls because there are many mathematical paths to connect two teams based on common opponents, opponent's opponents, etc. (All this is complicated by the obvious fact that if Team A beats Team B, and B beats C, that doesn't necessarily mean that A will beat C. We keep track of all that mathematically.)
Wins and losses are considered explicitly, so other things being equal, it's better to win a game than lose one, but the message here is that a one point win isn't *that* much different from a one point loss when you're trying to figure out how good a team is going forward. Some will argue that rankings should "reward" teams for what they've done. What I've developed is a system that uses what they've done to predict how well they'll do on their next outing.
Click here to see our predictions for the conference championship games.
- David Annis, Ph.D.
Purdue, 2003
(Mathematical Statistics)