Wisconsin is the fifth best football team in the country.
At least they are in the numbers of Jeff Sagarin, creator of one of the six BCS computer polls.
According to Sagarin’s preferred rating system, only four teams lie ahead of the Badgers and that’s counting the “loss” to Arizona State, who are sixth in these rankings.
But when Sagarin submits his rankings to the BCS, he will register the Badgers as the 20th best team in the country. This is because Sagarin is forced by a BCS restriction to not use margin of victory in his rankings, even if it makes the rankings less accurate (and he admits this, on the masthead of his rankings).
Yes, you read that correctly. The BCS decreed that stopping teams like Wisconsin from destroying the UMass’s of the world was more important than accurately ranking teams.
This is just one step in a long tradition of the BCS altering its computer polls for political reasons. A quality win bonus was installed after Miami missed out on the national championship despite a wealth of perceived quality wins.
The edict to eliminate margin of victory in computer polls came in 2002 after Nebraska reached the national championship thanks to beating down inferior teams. After the 2003 split-championship fiasco, the BCS was reorganized and the computer rankings lost much of their weight, since they were the ones who locked out USC from the title game.
In all of these incidents, the computers were deemed incorrect and altered to fit the human polls idea of how teams should be evaluated. That is really, really stupid.
Any student who has ever paid attention in a chemistry or statistics class knows that you do not change your procedures to get the data you want.
That flies in the face of the entire reason you do experiments and calculations in the first place.
Altering the computers to match human opinion completely defeats their purpose.
This is all just another reason why no tears will be shed when the BCS finally gives way to the badly named, but better constructed College Football Playoff next season.
The BCS deemed political correctness and similarities to human polls as more important than supposed objective accuracy, because accuracy might be divergent from what they expected.
Also, it’s not like teams really cared much about political correctness. Ohio State beat a team 76-0 earlier this season. Guys, maybe teams just like destroying things.
Because of this fear of divergent accuracy, the polls we use to objectively rank teams and eliminate bias now have built in bias, because they have been altered to be like the very thing they were supposed to oppose.
Maybe the BCS should have just stopped using computer polls. Anytime the computer polls did what they were added to the BCS to do, offer an opinion that opposed the human polls, the BCS just altered the computer polls to make sure that it would never happen again.
If they were afraid of something doing what it was supposed to do, why did they keep that thing around?
Will you miss the BCS system? How long have you been looking forward to the College Football Playoff? Let Jack know what you think by emailing jfbaer@wisc.edu.
