BCS Has Computer Issues, But So What?

We're having a near full-scale computer meltdown in this, the final year of the BCS era.

Two weeks ago, Jeff Sagarin, the operator of one of the six BCS computers, unveiled a new rankings system dubbed "Pure Elo" to replace the "Elo Chess" system that had been in use by the BCS since 2002. While the new system was supposed to be an improvement, it was immediately engulfed in controversy.

Why? Because in the first appearance of "Pure Elo," Bethune-Cookman was ranked No. 4, Fordham 7th and Coastal Carolina 10th. In all, seven FCS teams were ranked in the top 25, and Harvard was ranked ahead of Notre Dame.

A week later, Sagarin quietly retweaked the formula and the FCS teams tumbled down the rankings. I have asked Jeff for an explanation, as have others. So far, none of us have heard back.

Why is Sagarin tinkering with the formula in the final season of the BCS? Next year, the standings will be going away and the computer rankings will have no real influence on the new College Football Playoff except being used as a reference tool.

(FULL ARTICLE @ BLEACHER REPORT)

Remaking the BCS Formula

Part I of the Troubleshooting the BCS Series

After another season of high-wire acts, the temptation of course is to blow the BCS to smithereens and start over. But that's neither practicable nor desirable.

It's not practicable because the current BCS contract does not run out until after the 2013 season, so any wholesale change toward a playoff now or in the foreseeable future is just not reality based. It's not desirable because without thoroughly considering all the issues - logistics and otherwise - any move made in haste would only invite more disaster.

There is something that could be done - immediately - about the BCS within the framework of the current structure. It's possible to implement changes even before the next season, as the BCS has proved to be quite nimble when it comes to making up stuff as we go - witness this past season's sudden decision to allow three conference teams to be included in BCS bowl games.

When the commissioners gather for their annual meeting in April, instead of patting each other on the back and passing out vapid congratulations, they would be better off re-examining the BCS. And the best place to start would be the formula that creates the BCS standings.

The formula in its current form has survived since 2004, with the only change being that the Harris Poll replaced the Associated Press poll before the 2005 season. The current formula, created in the aftermath of the USC-LSU split championship in 2003, places overwhelming emphasis on the human polls. This is troubling because the most unstable and subjective part of the formula, naturally, is the human polls. And even more troubling is the utter lack of transparency of these two polls.

That, and a few other things, may be fixed rather quickly and easily. So here's how:

1. Bring transparency into the polls - Neither the coaches poll nor the Harris poll reveals its weekly voting results until the final week of the regular season, when the final BCS standings are released. Any system that's worth its salt demands accountability. Imagine if your congressman never had to reveal how he voted until the last bill of his term. That just won't do.

It's easy enough for the BCS to demand the Harris poll make its ballots public every week. The BCS commissioned the Harris poll, therefore owns it. If any voter objects to this new guideline, then see you later. There will be plenty of people willing and able to vote in the Harris poll.

The coaches poll is the more thorny issue. For years the coaches have resisted making their ballots open to the public and it took a near act of congress to get them to reveal the final poll. And since the BCS champion ultimately is merely the coaches poll champion, there's not a whole lot the BCS can do about it, right?

Not really. I believe there is a creative solution. The BCS commissioners can simply issue an ultimatum to their coaches to open the ballots, or else risking to have their votes become even more irrelevant. I'm sure the Black Coaches & Administrators will be more than happy to step in with their own poll. The BCA is not happy with college football's hiring practices - and rightly so - but this will be a way to increase its visibility. For the BCS, this will be a public relations coup. So if the coaches don't play ball, simply have their poll replaced by a new BCA poll.

2. Eliminate tiebreaker madness - What happened in the Big 12 Conference this year is simply unacceptable. The BCS formula was never conceived to determine anything but the top two teams for the BCS title game. The easy thing to do here is for the commissioners to police their own conferences to make sure the BCS formula will never come close to being any sort of a tiebreaker ever again.

3. Allow margin of victory back in the computers - Following the 2001 season, in a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, MoV was purged from all computer rankings ostensibly to discourage teams from running up the score. The problem is, the human voters didn't get the memo. The first fallout from this decision took place in 2003, when Oklahoma, after gotten blown out by four touchdowns in the Big 12 championship game, still stayed No. 1 in the BCS standings thanks to the computers now unable to distinguish a one-point loss from a 28-point rout.

Computer programmers should write their own formulas. The BCS has no business telling what these guys should do. It should demand to audit the results throughout the season, but leave the programming to the professionals. After all, all computer programs had built in a safeguard against excessive scoring, with either 21 points or 28 points as the threshold.

Computer rankings become much more pure and accurate when margin of victory is taken into consideration. Just think about this for a moment: If you were betting your house on a game, would you dare to look at only a team's won-loss records but not how much they won and lost by?

4. Re-calibrate the computer ratings - One of the dumbest things about the BCS formula is it mixes percentages with ordinal numbers. For the human polls, it counts actual votes for teams instead of rankings; but for computers, it uses the rankings only. So when a team falls from 2nd to 3rd in the computers, the consequences are disastrous; but when a team falls from 2nd to 3rd in the polls, it could be just about a dead-heat, as far as the BCS standings are concerned.

The BCS should keep the human part of the formula the way it is but normalize the computer rankings so they become compatible with one another numerically. An easy way to do this is to fix the top team at 1.000 and derive percentages for other teams based on their respective computer scores.

I checked all six BCS computer systems and found that their scores are fairly uniform. Teams ranked 10th score about .86 to .92 points and teams ranked at No. 25 score about .74-.81. What this does is that it stabilizes the system and reduces the wild swings toward the end of the season when a games not even involving the principals holds such sway as the Cincinnati-Hawaii game did at the end of the 2008 regular season.

5. Re-balance the formula - If steps 1-4 are taken, then we can move on to this, which should bring objectivity back to the formula and take some pressure off the voters. I mean, if we're just gonna let the voters decide everything, why even bother with a formula - we can just use the AP poll instead. After all, since the adoption of the current formula, the AP has produced the same top two teams every season anyway.

By going 50-50, the new standings also give the non-BCS teams a fighting chance. The human polls are always stacked against non-BCS teams, but the computers give them a fairer shake. And if we ever move toward at least a plus-one system involving four teams, then a team like Utah in 2008 might have a shot at qualifying.

Did I say Plus-One? Ah, you'll have to come back for Part II.