and you want your opinion to matter more. Am I the only one who sees the irony in that?

You want your opinion on seeing the irony of wanting one’s own opinion to matter more, to matter more. Am I the only one who sees the tautology in that?

When I am talking about “predictive value.” It’s how the BCS formula ranking relates to predicting actual outcomes. At that it is worse than just a raw baseline of wins and strength of schedule.

The formula’s purpose is to determine whether team No. 2 is better than team No. 3. It can’t do that with any definition, clarity or legitimacy. That’s why we get into asinine debates every time there aren’t two distinct teams that belong in the game.

This is the point. The main flaw with the BCS is only giving us two teams to play for the title, when there are other teams that are good enough to have a chance to win. The SRS may be better at determining the quality of teams, but if you just used it to give us two teams to play for the title, it would not be any better than the BCS.

Any method is imperfect

Yes.

but

No. No buts. Just stop right there. You (see, every talking head ever) have an opinion about another opinion (the BCS ‘opinion’), and you want your opinion to matter more. Am I the only one who sees the irony in that?

I’ve seen one Mr. Douglas drop a few F-Bombs. I fucking know he’s said fuck a fucking bunch of fucking times. Fuck.

I laughed. Duffy, more of the sense of humor thing. That was funny.

You can say FUCK, Duffy.

You can. I work here.

The formula’s purpose is to determine whether team No. 2 is better than team No. 3. It can’t do that with any definition, clarity or legitimacy. That’s why we get into asinine debates every time there aren’t two distinct teams that belong in the game.

You can say FUCK, Duffy.

In 14 BCS title games, 50% of teams playing debuted at 1 or 2 in initial standings. 4 of 28 have come from outside the initial top 5. Yep, clearly not predictive. That is clearly not what you are intimating with your opening salvo. At least you don’t cherry pick stats to dishonestly try to prove your point.

What the f*ck are you talking about? Of course the initial BCS formula has a pretty good prediction rate for determining which teams the BCS formula will choose.

How is SRS flawed?

Just for the record I agree with the basic premise that SRS is a better ranking system than the BCS.

As I understand it SRS considers only two metrics: point differential (with some limits), and opponents SOS. I am going to quote a few things from this post:

The system does not take into account injuries, weather conditions, yardage gained, the importance of the game, whether it was a Monday Night game or not, whether the quarterback’s grandomother was sick, or anything else besides points scored and points allowed.

This system, like all systems, has some drawbacks, but it has the virtue of simplicity. It is easy to understand and it produces numbers that are easy to interpret. That is not to be sneezed at.

The bolded part is the main point I was trying to make earlier. The nature of college football makes it literally impossible to have any perfect system for ranking the quality of teams. I don’t think that’s controversial and I assume you agree.

So that’s how SRS is flawed — all ranking systems are flawed. As far as I can tell it is the best system for ranking CFB teams. But I’m not really convinced it’s that much better than the BCS, particularly at the very top which is basically the only thing that matters for the BCS. And as to the first quote above, simplicity is a virtue but I’m sure there are good arguments to be made for including other metrics in the system to make it more accurate. I haven’t seen any evidence that only considering point differential and SOS is inherently the best way to rank teams.

It weights all points equally, and therefore ignores wins and losses – take a look at the Colts season chart above. If you take away 10 points in week 3 and give them back 10 points in week 4, you’ve just changed their record, but you haven’t changed their rating at all. If you take away 10 points in week 3 and give back 20 points in week 4, you have made their record worse but their rating better. Most football fans put a high premium on the few points that move you from a 3-point loss to a 3-point win and almost no weight on the many points that move you from a 20-point win to a 50-point win.

I am also not sure why you think predictive systems are so preferable to retrodictive ones, at least with respect to individual college football seasons. While it’s true that predictive systems are better at ranking the relative quality of teams, it actually does matter who wins and loses games in a college football season. It might be true that hypothetically you could have a team get left out of the championship game despite being a ‘better’ team than another team that is in the game. But I can’t think of any cases in which I have a problem with that. The point is to win games and sometimes (always) there is a lot of luck involved.

In my view the BCS is not really terribly flawed as a ranking system. Its main problem is that it only matches two teams against each other, and there are always at least a few other teams who are good enough to compete for the championship. These teams are almost always ranked near the top of the BCS rankings. So for that reason I am not a proponent of the BCS, and look forward to playoffs. But not because I think the BCS is just horribly shitty at ranking teams.

Duffy will be here all night.

/thought the dude was dead in the beginning tumbling around like that

I’m not a fan of the BCS, but so is SRS. Pretty sure it’s not possible to rank CFB teams without combining metrics that are flawed in some way. Still worth trying to do though.

How is SRS flawed?