Week 6: Lazy & Blind Rankings

Back this week with the updated rankings. I’ve also made a tweak to the conference ranking formula used last week that you’ll see below. A brief overview of the ranking formula:

1. I picked the simplest scale I could think of: 1-9
2. Teams are given a point value for every game on their schedule thus far. The point system looks like this:
   

   Opp Team & Result	Win Pts	Loss Pts
   BCS – Road	9	-1
   BCS – Neutral	8	-2
   BCS – Home	7	-3
   Non-BCS – Road	6	-4
   Non-BCS – Neutral	5	-5
   Non-BCS – Home	4	-6
   1-AA – Road	3	-7
   1-AA – Neutral	2	-8
   1-AA – Home	1	-9

   So beating a BCS team on the road is worth 9 points, but losing to a 1-AA team at home docks you 9 points.

3. To get a teams culmative score, you assign the correct value for the game and sum up all of the resulting values. So, for example, beating a BCS team on the road, but losing to a Non-BCS team at home would give you a total of 3 points.
4. These are non-weighted scores, which is where the ‘Blind’ part comes in. This means the actual opponent doesn’t matter. So beating Duke on the road is the same as beating Florida on the road.

Teams

Tidbits

1. With 4 teams in the top-10 and 5 in the top-15, the SEC is the sexy conference right now. Strangely, the next SEC team isn’t until 35 and that’s Georgia. The rest of the SEC is pretty bad.
2. Despite their big win at LSU last night, Florida has still not played a top-5 schedule.
3. The ACC has two teams in the top-5. Va Tech is not a surprise, but Georgia Tech gets in with 2 road wins and 2 home wins over BCS teams combined with a single loss on the road to a BCS team.
4. The Big East is not nearly as laughably as people thought at the start of the year.

Conferences

Last week, I presented conference rankings as a simple aggregate of the individual member scores found above. I realized that such a formula would skew in favor of conferences with a small number of teams in with very high scores. So from now on, I’ll be dividing a conferences aggregate by the number of teams in that conference.

Tidbits:

1. The conference order didn’t change at all.
2. The gap between the Big 12 and the ACC is incredibly small. That flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of the Big 12 being the 1A to the SECs 1 conference ranking.
3. The only non-conference games left for the Pac-10 are against Notre Dame.

Wrapping up

I’ll use this ranking for my Mumme Ballot for one more week. Next week, every 1-A team will have played at least 6 games, so I’ll transition to a more exhaustive ranking formula. I’ll be unveiling it this week