Sports computer rankings guru Jeff Sagarin is 77 and still trying to perfect his system for evaluating college football teams even though he knows it’s impossible.
If he thinks he’s getting close, he reminds himself of when he was growing up in New Rochelle, New York, and believed he had cracked the code.
With pencil and paper, he ranked teams based on their points for and against and used his rudimentary formula to come up with his weekly entry in a local newspaper’s pick-the-winners contest. He recalls Nov. 18, 1961, as the Saturday he got his reality check: He hit on 13 of 15 games only to find out a grandmother in Brooklyn had won by making picks based on team uniform colors.
“I threw my hands up in despair,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Sagarin told the anecdote to illustrate his point that the preseason decision by the College Football Playoff to place more emphasis on strength of schedule when determining which teams make the 12-team field won’t mitigate the debates. No metric, he said, is infallible.
The CFP committee will announce its first weekly rankings on Tuesday night. The final rankings setting the 12-team field come out Dec. 7.
The CFP and strength of schedule
Sagarin rose to prominence in the 1980s when USA Today began publishing his football rankings. Theys were among the components used to determine the teams that would play for the national championship in the Bowl Championship Series from 1998-2013.
He continues to post rankings in college football and other sports on his website and if you want a flavor of what ratings gurus wrestle with, here is a taste: “The schedule ratings represent what the rating would have to be for a hypothetical team to have a mathematical expectation of winning precisely 50% of their games against the schedule played by the team in question in the games that it has played so far.”
The CFP said in August that its schedule strength metric has been adjusted to apply greater weight to games against strong opponents and the metric known as “record strength” has been added to the selection committee’s analysis “to go beyond a team’s schedule strength to assess how a team performed against that schedule.”
“This metric rewards teams defeating high-quality opponents while minimizing the penalty for losing to such a team,” the CFP said. “Conversely, these changes will provide minimal reward for defeating a lower-quality opponent while imposing a greater penalty for losing to such a team.”
The committee’s greater emphasis on playing, and beating, tough opponents undoubtedly inspired the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast conferences to go from eight to nine conference games beginning next year.
Babson College math professor and statistician Rick Cleary said the record-strength metric naturally would look more favorably upon a 9-3 SEC team than a 12-0 Mid-American Conference team and, in turn, justify the SEC getting an abundance of teams into the playoff.
“So they’re sort of giving you a coupon for playing a tough schedule,” Cleary said.
So which stats matter?
Record strength is a metric created by ESPN more than a decade ago to measure the chance an average Top 25 team would have the same record or better with the same schedule.
Cleary said a limitation of that measurement is that it doesn’t take into account margin of victory, just whether a team won or lost. However, he noted, members of the committee know the scores and each will interpret them in their own way.
“They don’t just know Tennessee beat Syracuse,” he said. “They know it was Tennessee 45, Syracuse 26, so you can’t hide from that.”
Sheldon Jacobson, a computer science professor and sports analytics expert at the University of Illinois, noted a recent and now inherent problem: Conference expansion created what he says is imbalanced scheduling.
“When you have only a 12- or 13-game schedule in college football, you have what I would call holes of competition because there are teams that could avoid playing very good teams,” Jacobson said. “Because the schedules are not complete, every team does not play every other team, so you always have the question, ‘What if?’”
A spokesman said the CFP would have no comment beyond its August statement. The CFP’s analytics provider, SportSource, did not respond to a request for comment.
This year’s c
ontenders
The current AP Top 25 is led by No. 1 Ohio State, No. 2 Indiana, No. 3 Texas A&M and No. 4 Alabama. All four teams figure to be in the mix for the top four seeds in the initial CFP rankings but much will be scrutinized over the next month ahead of the bracket announcement, including strength of schedule.
According to the ESPN, Texas A&M, Indiana and Ohio State are the top three teams in strength of record, followed by No. 8 BYU and Alabama. Alabama has the top strength of schedule among serious playoff contenders, according to ESPN, and is followed by No. 5 Georgia, No. 13 Texas and No. 11 Oklahoma.
TeamRankings.com lists Alabama, Indiana, Georgia and Notre Dame as the top four contenders in strength of schedule. Pro Football Focus’s order: Alabama, Georgia, Notre Dame and Ohio State.
Computers help only to a point
Sagarin said beyond head-to-head matchups and how a team’s opponents fared against their schedules, he values margin of victory and performance in road games. Sagarin’s track record gives his rankings credibility, but another analyst might value other metrics differently.
“People keep thinking we’ll tweak this until it’s perfect,” Cleary said. “Well, it’s never going to be perfect. The best you can do is pretty good or quite good, but it’s really, really hard. Not just hard, impossible. It’s mathematically impossible to have a system that could satisfy everything you would want to be true about a ranking system.”
In the end, the analytics are just tools. How committee members use them, individually or as a group, is subjective.
“You need people with good human judgment,” Sagarin said, “but let them have access to the different computers and they’ll gravitate to what they like.”
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By ERIC OLSON
AP College Football Writer
