Saturday, December 19, 2009

2009 Gus Rankings: Bowl Edition

As there was only one game last weekend between FBS schools, here are the final Gus Rankings for the regular season. I neglected to put the numbers next to the schools noting their actual rank, but here are the previous week's rankings that should be reflective of this week's rankings.

One big advantage of the Gus Rankings would seem to be its ability to compare teams across conferences. If there only were a natural experiment to test this...oh wait, the NCAA offers 35 games that match teams from different conferences. Let's see how Gus does!

(Justin talked about college bowl games here , and here is a similar experiment I did two years ago.)

The typical format for picking bowl games seems to be to assign a point value to each game and see how many points you can accumulate. You are to give every game a point value between 1 and 35, and you can only use each value once. Naturally, the games you feel most strongly about you will give the most points. The key, of course, is to define "feel most strongly about."

We'll do it as follows. Each team has a point total for the season; the team with the most points in the bowl matchup will be predicted as the winner, and the difference in points will determine the confidence in the game.

So, for which bowl game is Gus most confident? That would be the Chick-fil-A Bowl, with Virginia Tech (42 points) lining up against Tennessee (12). Gus also feel pretty confident about the Gator Bowl, with West Virginia (32) facing Florida State (4).

Least confident? Gus is opinion-free concerning the Holiday Bowl, that has Arizona (28) squaring off against Nebraska (28), and isn't terribly confident about the BCS Championship Game, Alabama (75) and Texas (74), the Texas Bowl, Missouri (18) and Navy (17), and the Champs Sports Bowl, Miami (FL) (33) and Wisconsin (32). We'll use the wisdom of the crowd to break any ties-- 76% of the CBS Sportsline crowd likes Nebraska, so we'll go with them, and we'll follow the same methodology to assign confidence levels for bowls that have the same difference in points.

The first game is this afternoon so you'll need to act quickly, but feel free to pit your strategy against the all-knowing, simple-calculating power that is the Gus Rankings.

2 comments:

danreagan said...

I've posted 3 blogs that use rankings too, & if you have the time & inclination to read them, I'd appreciate any reactions or comments you might have.

You can find them at The Dark Horse Dispatch: darkhorsedispatch.com

(1) COLLEGE FOOTBALL RANKINGS, THE BCS, TCU AND ….. POLITICS?
(2)Republicans & the Smarty-Pants Vote: Part One, and
(3)Whole Foods Republicans & the Smarty-Pants Vote: Part Two

If you get the chance to read them, I'd sure appreciate your comments!

Dan Reagan

Anonymous said...

Not sure where to post this but I wanted to ask if anyone has heard of National Clicks?

Can someone help me find it?

Overheard some co-workers talking about it all week but didn't have time to ask so I thought I would post it here to see if someone could help me out.

Seems to be getting alot of buzz right now.

Thanks