here. This appeared in Wednesday’s Slate.
Actually I disagree with the Great One on a couple things here - his overview of the NCAA and the relationship between the haves and have-nots of college sports is simplistic at best.
But he does make a couple points that haven’t been made enough. The computer rankings aren’t rankings by computers, they’re ranking methods devised by humans. There’s a big, important difference.
If the BCS understood that difference it wouldn’t react to disparities is results between the computer rankings and the human polls by forcing changes on the computer guys, as they’ve done several times. They wouldn’t forbid anybody from using margin of victory as a factor in a formula, for example.
Those disparities are - assuming the BCS is worth doing at all - a good thing. Why develop a method to replace the polls that agrees with the polls? Because using the word “computer,” amounts to making a pass at objectivity?
Yeah, I’m tired of this, too. It all ends, for another year, in a day or so.
