Quote:
Originally Posted by GirlySports
You can't assume how bad Nebraska really is or Miami really is. They were highly ranked when they were beat which means everything in this system. If someone beats Boise State this year, people will jump up and down and say 'see see see, I knew they sucked" but in fact they are highly ranked right now so the teams that beat them plus the teams that beat that team will get a big boost.
I thought Wisconsin would have jumped a bit higher.
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No, where they were ranked when the game was played means absolutely nothing to the computers. Some of the computers place more emphasis on games later in the season than earlier games, but that's about the extent of it. To the computers, Miami is the #27 team (or whatever they are now) so Ohio St. (for example) doesn't get more credit for beating them when they were #11.
All this computer hate that is taking over the college football world is simply a matter of ignorance. Like valo keeps repeating, the computers are designed to get the rankings right in December, not mid-October. There's plenty of information on how each computer ranking is calculated (except for the exact formula which 99.9% of people wouldn't understand anyways) and usually it's pretty simple. The most important thing is strength of schedule which at this point in the season is hard to calculate.
The big issue with the computers (and it's not the computers fault) is that margin of victory was taken out of the formulas for sportsmanship reasons which is an absolute joke. For some reason, it's fine for AP voters, the media, fans, etc. etc. to judge teams based on how much they win by, but when a computer does it it encourages blowouts.
The hilarious thing is that fixing the "problem" is so simple. All they have to do is divide margin of victory in segments (1-3 pt win, 4-7 pt win, etc.) and have a cap when you get a pre-determined blowout win (ie; 25 points is a blowout so winning by 26 and winning by 40 have the same value). You could get more specific and do it point by point (instead of segments) until the blowout cap, but I think the segments makes more sense due to the unique nature of football scoring (ie; winning by 4 points and 6 points is basically the same since the other team needs to another TD to win in either case).
I always find it funny that whenever the computers do something wacky it's a national outrage when there's absolutely ridiculous errors made by the human polls every week.