19 November, 2010

College Football Update



Yes, I know it’s been almost two weeks since I’ve updated anything here. Things have been busy at home. And I’ve been making lots of changes to my sports ratings application, some to improve, and some because the site that I retrieve my college basketball information from is no longer being updated. So, I had to find a new site, and write the code to handle it. In the process I found a couple bugs that needed to be fixed, so I had to spend some time on that as well.

Anyway, the long and the short is that I’ve been busy, but should be able to return to more regular updates starting this weekend.

Congratulations to South Florida, Syracuse, West Virginia, East Carolina, Army, Miami-Ohio, Air Force, and Kentucky which all became bowl eligible this week. That brings the number of bowl eligible teams to 55. There are 35 bowls this season, so we still need 15 teams. That’s quite a bit considering that most teams will end their season in the next two weeks.

Condolences to Alabama-Birmingham, Duke, Virginia, Kansas, and Arizona State, which can no longer reach bowl eligibility this season (unless the rules change). That brings the number of teams ineligible for bowls to 27.

There are 120 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision (the division formerly known as D-1A) for those keeping score at home. So, if the number of ineligible teams reaches 51, we have a problem.

Ratings?

Computer top 5:

  1. Oregon
  2. Auburn
  3. Boise St
  4. TCU
  5. Missouri

The computer rating is a composite of a “Win”-based rating much like what’s used in the BCS, and a somewhat Margin-Of-Victory (MOV) based rating.

In case you’re interested in the breakdown, here’s Win:

  1. Auburn
  2. Oregon
  3. TCU
  4. LSU
  5. Stanford

I have really revamped MLE this week. It now handles “surprises” much better. Basically, if a team has played 5 games and been fairly consistent for four of them, but played at a radically different level for the 5th, then the computer now limits the impact of that fifth game. This is something I’ve been meaning to put in for quite a while, as I use MLE for projections, and this should make my projections better.

Here’s this week’s MLE top 5:

  1. Oregon
  2. Alabama
  3. Auburn
  4. Oklahoma
  5. Ohio State

As I predicted last update, Oregon’s MLE rating is no longer stratospheric. They’re actually at a fairly reasonable level for the #1 team this late in the season. 1945 Army can rest knowing that once again they are #1 all time, and likely to remain so.