Monday, December 20, 2010

Bowl Showdown 2010: Gus vs. Sagarin

As the college football bowl season is underway, it is fun to track Gus' ability as a predictor of bowl games against other, more complicated schemes. What better one to compare it to than Jeff Sagarin's. Both rankings predict identical outcomes for many of the bowls, but the discrepancies are listed below in chronological order (Gus' prediction given, Sagarin's would be the opposite):

December 23 - Poinsettia Bowl - Navy over San Diego State
December 28 - Champs Sports Bowl - West Virginia over North Carolina State
December 31 - Liberty Bowl - Central Florida over Georgia
January 1 - Capital One Bowl - Michigan State over Alabama
January 3 - Orange Bowl - Virginia Tech over Stanford
January 4 - Sugar Bowl - Ohio State over Arkansas
January 10 - BCS Championship - Auburn over Oregon

As there's an odd number of differences, there has to be a winner! For the record, both rankings picked all three already-played bowl games identically and sit at 2-1. (Correct on BYU and Northern Illinois, incorrect on Ohio University.)

2 comments:

rolub said...

The ROB rankings (which are partial to GUS) agree with 4 out of the 7.

siredge said...

So SDSU beat Navy (1 for Sag), NC State beat WV (1 for Sag), UCF beat Georgia (1 for Gus), Alabama beat MiSt (1 for Sag), Stanford beat VTech (1 for Sag), OhSt beat AK (1 for Gus), and Auburn beat OR (1 for Gus), so Gus went 3-4 against Sagarin.

As a side note, a friend was asking for advice on the company bowl pool, that used both victor and confidence points. I recommended that he use Gus. He ended up 6th out of over 20.