The Andrew Extravaganza

My Top 25 after 8 weeks of action:

1. Ohio State (1)
2. Louisiana State (4)
3. Oregon (7)
4. Oklahoma (3)
5. Boston College (5)
6. Arizona State (11)
7. Kansas (17)
8. South Florida (2)
9. West Virginia (9)
10. Florida (12)
11. Virginia Tech (13)
12. Southern California (14)
13. Missouri (16)
14. South Carolina (8)
15. Michigan (24)
16. Kentucky (10)
17. Penn State (20)
18. Virginia (21)
19. California (6)
20. Texas (22)
21. Rutgers (NR)
22. Auburn (15)
23. Hawaii (23)
24. Connecticut (NR)
25. Wake Forest (NR)

Dropped Out:
Illinois (18)
Cincinnati (19)
Florida State (25)

And the Power Rankings:




LSU is still holding onto the top spot. Oklahoma dropped one spot for the second straight week. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how well the computer rankings hold up to a quick eyeball inspection. Teams like Kansas and Connecticut, which earlier in the year appeared to be aberrations--basketball schools taking advantage of a system working out its kinks, but they have taken on stronger opponents recently and have fared well enough to warrant those high rankings.

The only issue I have with my computer rankings at the moment is the way that the key stats are normalized, meaning every team is ranked according to their strength relative to the best team in the country. When I first began creating my spreadsheets I had a few notes jotted down and built from there by trial and error. The simplest way to get a reasonable list of teams on a neat and tidy 100 point scale was to normalize. To do things on an absolute scale I would have needed limits to scale from, and at that point I didn't want to guess at those limits.

So going forward I will have a measure of a team's absolute dominance in a given season. This means it will be possible to compare teams from one year to teams from another year and have an objective way to discuss them. Of course it will be several years before I will have enough data to bother with comparisons. But at least now that's an option, whereas before I would just be comparing two 100.00 point teams using the relative scale of ratings.

I'll post more in-depth on the picks issues tomorrow, but going forward I'll be tracking absolute versus relative power ratings to see which system performs better against the spread.

On the right are the top 30 teams on the absolute rating scale. The average rating of the 120 Division I-A teams is 62.0. The minimum rating is 41.6; Florida International is the proud owner.