Today's Homework: The BCS

Hey kids!

Welcome to today’s class. I am here with you today because the grownups in charge of the BCS seem to be having some difficulty. You see kids, the people who rank college football teams have complicated formulas which help them figure out which team belongs in a certain position in the polls. But these formulas, or recipes, are just not working. In fact, they are making me sick.

So here’s how we are going to fix it. I want you to look at the following list of teams. In parenthesis, you will see 2 numbers – for example, (10-0). The first number represents how many times that team has won this season. The second number represents how many losses that team has had during this season. I’m going to give you a list of 15 teams. I would like you to look at those teams and the numbers in parenthesis for each team and put them in order from 1 to 15. Please put the best team in the 1 spot and the worst team in the 15 spot. You will have 15 minutes to do this. I will post the answer key below for your review when you are done.

Teams
Ohio State (11-0), Michigan (11-0), Florida (9-1), USC (8-1), Notre Dame (9-1), Arkansas (9-1), West Virginia (8-1), Rutgers (9-0), LSU (8-2), Wisconsin (10-1), Texas (9-2), Louisville (8-1), Boise State (10-0), Wake Forest (9-1), Auburn (9-2)

Ready? Go!


Answer Key
1. Michigan (11-0)
2. Ohio State (11-0)
3. Boise State (10-0)
4. Rutgers (9-0)
5. Wisconsin (10-1)
6. Notre Dame (9-1)
7. Arkansas (9-1)
8. Florida (9-1)
9. Wake Forest (9-1)
10. Louisville (8-1)
11. West Virginia (8-1)
12. USC (8-1)
13. LSU (9-2)
14. Texas (9-2)
15. Auburn (9-2)

Did you get all the right answers? This was a pretty simple task, right? You just had to put the teams with the most wins and zero losses first. And then you just use that process the whole way through. You rank first on wins, then on losses. For example, Wisconsin has 10 wins, which is 1 more than Rutgers, but Wisconsin has 1 loss and Rutgers has zero, so Rutgers gets the spot ahead of Wisconsin.

Your list may vary a little bit from mine because there are a few things that I know that you may not have known (well you may have known this, but I didn’t ask you to think about it when you did your rankings).

For starters, Michigan is ranked ahead of Ohio State because they beat two of the teams on our list (Wisconsin and Notre Dame) and Ohio State only beat one (Texas). Second, Notre Dame gets the 6 spot because their only loss is to the number 1 team on our list. Arkansas comes in at 7 because they lost to the 12th team on our list. Florida is 8 because they lost to the 15th team on our list. Wake Forest is 9 because they lost to a team that is missing from our list. Louisville is 10 because they lost to the 3rd team, while West Virginia is 11th because they lost to Louisville. USC gets the 12 spot because they lost to a team that is not on our list. Finally, we have the end of our list. LSU gets the nod at 13 because they lost to two teams on our list (Florida and Auburn). Texas is in at 14 because one of their losses was to Ohio State (2nd on our list). And wrapping up our poll in the number 15 spot is Auburn who has lost to only one team on our list (7-Arkansas).

Does anyone have any questions as to how we solved this problem? That’s okay; we can do a quick review. We started by taking all the teams who had zero or one loss. We then added the only other three teams with at least 9 wins. All these teams had only two losses, but the 9 wins put them at a higher importance than the plethora of 8-2 teams we chose to leave out. After that, we took the teams and ranked them based on their number of wins and losses. To settle any ties based on records, we looked at whom each team suffered their defeat(s) against. The only other tie breaker was Michigan over Ohio State based on who they had defeated from our list.

That’s it. No silly strength of schedule formulas. No looking at margin of victory. No looking at what conference they play in. We just did straight, simple calculation. It’s easy enough for any 7th grader...and you guys are only in 5th grade. Well done!

Class dismissed.