Two years ago, pretty much everyone -- fans, sports columnists, talk-show blowhards -- agreed that college football was nuts to decide its champion by polling writers and coaches. College football agreed, too. Sort of.
It downgraded the polls, but it wouldn't adopt a playoff system like every other sport. Playoffs might rob its scholar/athletes -- those with and without agents and/or arrest records -- of valuable classroom time.
So college football called in the geeks.
That was the decision in 1998, and now the Bowl Championship Series is using eight computers to help decide a champion, adding five rankings systems to the original three that brought Tennessee and Florida State together last January for the first consensus title game.
The eight computers together are one of four criteria that factor into the ultimate BCS ratings. The other three are win-loss record, strength of schedule, and polls.
"We wanted to get a broader base of information with the computers this year," BCS chairman Roy Kramer said. "We didn't want one computer playing too big of a role."
Kramer said the BCS studied 15 to 20 systems, but that's only a small portion of the total lurking out there. A Wisconsin mathematician has a Web page with links to over 90 separate rankings systems.
Kramer said venerability was the key factor in determining which formulae were chosen and which numbers runners would get the honor (there is no financial reward) of being part of the BCS.
"We required a minimum of about five years doing it, plus we wanted to run these systems back and compare their results with other rankings," he said. "We didn't want them all to come out the same, but we wanted to see how they were the same and different, and how they'd all fit together."
The 1999 gang of five joins The New York Times computer, the USA Today rankings done by MIT-grad and self-proclaimed sports-stats genius Jeff Sagarin, and the Seattle Times ratings system of Chris Hester and John Anderson.
They're an odd lot, the BCS newcomers, ranging from a 23-year-old graduate student to a retired mathematical statistician. One is a former preacher who, as a 5-foot-6, 90-pound high school senior, dared not step out on the gridiron. But he loved college football so much he has spent a serious chunk of his breathing days cataloging every game ever played -- more than 150,000 games in all.
Another is a 40-year veteran of the math and computer science departments at a small college in Kentucky. He also sells predictions through his Web site. And the fifth new guy, he's been dead for years, so his heirs carry on the good fight. Each of these masterminds believes his system alone could calculate the rankings.
They tiptoe around direct criticism -- the BCS has asked them to be polite to each other -- and only one rankings-maker will reveal his entire formula. But each is eager to point out what makes his system a better one, in the process demonstrating just how subjective these seemingly objective rankings really are.
For instance, a key point of cleavage among the bunch is margin of victory. Is a seven-touchdown blowout win better than squeaking by on a last-second field goal? In seven of the eight systems it is, but always to varying degrees.
"To us, it's not," said Chris Hester, co-proprietor of the Seattle Times rankings. "For some reason college football has evolved where winning by a large score matters more than just winning. There's not another sport where that's the case, and it's silly."
Last year, the Seattle rankings worked in UCLA's favor for much of the season, because the Bruins tended to win by razor-thin margins. This season, that same system impairs undefeated Virginia Tech, which wins big but does so against a soft schedule. That hurts the Hokies on the overall strength-of-schedule factor, just as it does with the computer rankings that count strength-of-schedule heavily.
So this past weekend, Virginia Tech fans demonstrated a serious rooting interest in the Notre Dame-Boston College and UAB-Tulane games -- all because Boston College and Alabama-Birmingham were Tech opponents this season. The better they do, the better Tech rates.
If this seems like an odd way to decide a championship, the guys with the computers tend to agree. Nearly across the board they believe a playoff would be a better way to decide things.
"Of course, on the field is the best way to do it, that's always the case," said ex-preacher Richard Billingsley.
That belief is the inspiration for a key component of the Billingsley ratings, one not found in any of the others: He puts overwhelming faith in head-to-head competition. Unless A has an outrageously poorer record than B, a victory by A over B virtually guarantees that A will be ranked higher than B.
"You can't, in my mind, rate college football fairly solely on mathematical equations," said Billingsley, who professes not to like math. He says -- as does Hester, a freelance radio reporter -- that anyone adept at high school algebra could work his formula.
"The way I look at it is the way most fans would see it, I believe. A fan's not going to be thinking about regression factors and all that stuff; a fan wants to know who won when the two teams played."
Billingsley also factors defensive excellence into his ratings, as does Ken Massey, the grad student who seems to be the only one in this crowd who doesn't have a story about using a big IBM mainframe, or an Olivetti crank adding machine, or even pencil and paper "in the early days" of doing rankings.
Massey also began applying a homefield-advantage factor this season. The New York Times, on the other hand, counts late-season games as more important than earlier ones.
And on and on it goes, with this quirk here and that quirk there, each introduced because the rankings too often move beyond assessing performance and into predicting future outcomes. It's a tricky business, and it's no surprise that with the season winding down a little controversy is bubbling.
Florida State, a perfect 11-0, has already cinched a spot in the Sugar Bowl, which this year will be played by Nos. 1 and 2 to decide the national championship. But will once-beaten Nebraska, based on off-field factors, overhaul Virginia Tech to advance to the Sugar Bowl? Even if the Hokies finish the season undefeated?
Jerry Palm, a banking-industry systems analyst from Chicago who moonlights as a sort of rankings watchdog, thinks that's unlikely, in part because the BCS recently changed its rules and decided not to count results from playoff games played in Division I-AA, the smaller schools who actually duke it out on the field to determine a champion.
And what does that have to do with Virginia Tech? You don't want to know.
