Chaos Rankings

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Comments are enabled - flame on!

I've enabled comments on this blog for anyone to use with no moderation and no anti-spam features. Be on your slightly-better-than-worst behavior. Keep the flaming to a minimum. You know the drill. If you abuse the comments, the comments go away and/or have to be moderated or require logging in and that sort of thing. And no one wants to deal with that.

The mission (statement) is go!

Sorry for the long delay. Things have been hectic. Anyway, what it the point of this website, the mission statement if you will. My goal is to produce a formula-based system for ranking college football teams. This is the same idea that is used for other computer-based components of the BCS. It would be nice to be included in that equation, and maybe if things go well this season, I'll send them a letter. But becoming part of the BCS isn't my goal. My goal is simply to provide my own system of rankings in as objective a manner as possible. Naturally, no system is going to be 100% objective as it was designed by a person with their own ideas and motives. But by keeping a formula consistent week in and week out, at the very least the rankings are objective relative to themselves and not influenced by big name players or extra coverage on Sports Center or having your secretary fill out your coaches poll ballot.
That said, how does the system work? This formula attempts to place an emphasis on the things that make one team better than another. Firstly, to be good, a team must win. Secondly, a good team will have outgained and outscored their opponents and collected more turnovers than they've given up. Finally, a good team must have defeated other good teams. Rankings are calculated two different ways (ratio and difference) using the same set of data, then final scores for each method are averaged and quantized to determine the final ranking.
For an example, here is full ranking of all Div. IA teams from last season prior to bowl games. That link will also provide a detailed explanation of how my formula works along with how I am weighting each component.
In my next post I hope to explain some of the advantages, shortcomings, and nuances of my ranking system. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Welcome!

Greetings world, this is my new blogging area that will be used for posting my weekly College Football rankings once the season starts. My goal is to use it as sparingly as possible for anything other than rankings and the discussion thereof. If I get big-headed enough, I may expland my rankings to include College Basketball eventually. Anyway, stay tuned. More information on my ranking system and the goals of this project will be forthcoming in the following weeks. In the mean time, feel free to peruse my personal blog.