The first TFBCS standings of the year were released yesterday on (single tear) Fox. This is the ninth season that The Fuckin' BCS (the only way in which we acknowledge it) has been used to help determine college football's national champion. Wow only nine years? It seemes like the frequent night terrors and constant crying started at least 13 years ago.
The consensus opinion was that Louisville would be ranked fifth in the first installment of the rankings, but TFBCS laughs at people who try to predict its top 10 based on rational thought and ranked the Cards seventh behind one-loss Auburn and one-loss Florida.
With a little help from BON's post on the same issue, we'll now attempt to explain, in part, why the Cards are ranked 7th in this horribly horribly retarded excuse for greedy rich ugly old people to make more money.
There are three factors that make the current TFBCS formula:
- A team's point total in the Harris Interactive Poll as a percentage of total points (max 2850).
- A team's point total in the USA Today Coaches Poll as a percentage of total points (max 1575).
- An average of six computer polls with the high and low discarded.
This means that the first part of Louisville's score can be found by dividing 2188 by 2850, which equals out to .768.
In the Coaches poll, Louisville is also ranked 6th with 1205 total points.
After dividing 1205 by 1575, we find out that the second part of Louisville's score is .765.
The final part involves the computer rankings. There are six computers rankings used by the BCS: Anderson/Hester, Richard Billingsley, Colley Matrix, Ken Massey, Jeff Sagarin, and Peter Wolfe. Each produces a top 25 where the top ranked team is awarded 25 points, and the second ranked team is awarded 24 points, etc. etc. If a team is not ranked in the top 25, they are awarded no points. The computer rankings take into account who you beat and where, but margin of victory is not considered.
Louisville is ranked 6, 10, 10, 13, 14, and 9 in the six computer polls. You throw out the scores for the highest (6) and the lowest (14) rankings and then divide the total score by 100.
So 16 + 16 + 13 + 17= 62/100= .620
So to get our final TFBCS score we add up all our scores and divide by three.
(.768+.765+.620) /3= .7176
Obviously what this shows is what everybody already knows, the computers are killing us.
Compare our computer score (.620) to that of Florida (.870) or Auburn (.810), and it becomes quite obvious why we're stuck behind two SEC teams with double digit losses. We know it's early and that the only thing that matters is your team winning its games, but just knowing that the possiblity that Louisville could be left out of the national championship because of six rankings concocted by things without pulses exists has us a little pissed off. Keep in mind that five of these six computers have USC as the #1 team in the country.
Go Rutgers, go Pitt, go West Virginia...against everybody else.
Fuckin BCS.