Dissecting the BCS

The BCS system is killing John Blum. The current way NCAA Football determines their rankings is making life hard for this tried and true War Eagle. Most of you don’t know John. But he’s been a loyal reader of this blog (and probably a few more on the web) and last week’s rankings put his math skills to the test.

Below are John’s words, I’m posting them here for you to see because, A. I am not smart enough to regurgitate or understand most of the math he did, and B. he does bring up some interesting if not disturbing issues.

Is he a little perturbed about the current way of settling things? Ahh, yes. And so much so that he took it upon himself to go Good Will Hunting on the calculations that determine the BCS rankings.

I took some editing liberties because, well, John got a little heated by this whole thing. But I can’t blame him for that.

The BCS is calculated wrong this week…it’s Louisville up a spot just barely past Texas…haven’t heard it anywhere else…my own investigative math… No big deal? Well…each team gets that ranking for one week and they become that ranking for one week. …it probably doesn’t matter at the ranking position where the error occurs but what it if happened higher up? The promos the public and thus human poll voters would be hearing for an entire week would be wrong…. They would say “ #4 team playing #18 team ” INSTEAD of “ #3 team playing #18 team.” Those numbers get in peoples heads! …and then when the human voters sit down on Sunday to place their new votes, many of them will assuredly be reviewing the previous weeks polls (including the math polls) while rectifying/justifying their new ballot…they will be rectifying/justifying with the WRONG overall BCS rankings and wrong math rankings unless they pulled an updated math poll (updated after Sunday nights game) from each individual math poll’s website.

I am not here to say John is right, nor am I here to say he is wrong. But I think John typifies the passion and love for NCAA Football. He went back and recalculated rankings and says he found an error that allowed a team to have a slightly higher ranking than they should.

John, I applaud you and your desire to keep everything on the up an up. Certainly if there is an error, it is not intentional and I know NCAA Football appreciates you double checking their math.

So just keep John in mind when reviewing this week's BCS standings. He'll let us know if there's a mix up. Wouldn’t it be so much easier, on John and football fans as a whole, if we just settled things on the field?