Ah, my bad on the misunderstanding. It still illustrates voter bias, though.
BobLibDem’s breakdown is pretty interesting considering who the #1 and #2 BCS teams are right now.
Two things:
1 - According to the unwritten rules, you are right, any undefeated team playing a reasonable major conference schedule gets ranked above any team with a loss - regardless of how good those 1 or 2 loss teams appear to be.
2 - But, from the perspective of “how good is ND” and all the other teams between 1 and 20 - #14 isn’t ridiculous. After the Stanford and Pitt games, I think ND is a good but not great team and they probably match up with the 1 or 2 loss teams.
I don’t say bias doesn’t exist- merely that there are other reasons for strange or unjustifiable voting.
Here in Austin, there’s a radio host named Bucky Godbolt. He was the University of Texas running backs coach when John Mackovic was head coach. Godbolt has said several times that John Mackovic used to hand HIM the ballot every week to fill out. Godbolt himself didn’t have much time to devote to the ballot, so he did what most of us would do: look at the current top 25, then look at the scores in the newspaper (today, of course, he’d look online), bump the losing teams down a few notches, and bump the winning teams up a few notches.
Mackovic himself never voted, and Goldbolt never gave the matter much study.
A lot of the experts who are SUPPOSED to be voting AREN’T really voting, because they can’t be bothered.
You forgot one thing. Money. Modify your algorithm to include network/bowl game dollars brought in to selected conferences, and by inference, selected teams.
Actually, it is, but it doesn’t matter because I misunderstood **Munch’s **comment. Probably nobody ranked them at 14, but some definitely had them at 4 or lower.
What of KSU beating Iowa State and Oklahoma each by less than a TD? Even great teams have some close games.
Although I (and every single BCS computer) think ND should be in the top 2 today, I won’t be completely shocked if they lose at USC to end the season, in which case none of this will have mattered.
ND is not a great team. If Oregon’s defense was better they would be a great team, but you can’t let USC score what they did and still be called “great”.
Stanford is ranked #14 and based on what I have seen of them and ND this season, they are pretty close.
Do you understand what the #2 ranking means? It means they are undefeated and there are only a few other undefeated teams. As I said before, ND gets credit for that and anyone that actually ranks them lower than #3 is playing by a different set of rules.
But it doesn’t mean they would have the 2nd or 3rd best record if all top 25 teams played each other ten times. In that case they would probably end up somewhere between 5 and 15 (IMO).
Then there are no great teams this year? KSU is at best on par with ND, given their schedule. Alabama is obviously not great.
If you actually look at the computer rankings for the BCS, they all have ND at 1 or 2. Oregon, another undefeated team, is only ranked in the top 3 by one of the 6 computers. So, just being undefeated is not all that matters.
I don’t think any of the times rise to that level this year. They all seem mortal.
True, the computers do play by a different set of rules than the human polls.
I like the idea of the computers being impartial, but I also think they don’t get the whole story just like humans don’t either.
I would be curious to know how the computer and human polls do from the perspective of predicting victory based on rank. Are any of them very accurate when teams are within 5 to 10 spots of each other?