Comments on College Football by the Numbers: Rectifying a Stupid Conclusion - Preseason Polls

As soon as I can get my hands on the data I'm goin...

2008-08-26T12:35:00.000-04:00

As soon as I can get my hands on the data I'm going to look into it. I agree that polls can be "sticky" sometimes, and I also hate it when Notre Dame and Michigan (as good current examples) start out way too high or jump 27 spots because they win a big game. I can already envision some interesting analyses of poll stickiness and poll love.

Good point, and I see what you're saying that it w...

2008-08-26T11:51:00.000-04:00

Good point, and I see what you're saying that it would be slightly different than your question.

I think what bothers people (and me) about the pre-season ranking is that the voters tend to make the top-ranked teams "sticky." So if the top-ranked teams in the pre-season end up the year with the same number of losses, the #1 team will still be #1.

I guess I would try to model that by including a term for # of losses. Or # of losses - (least # of losses by any team).

Not suggesting you do that, since like you said you don't have the data and it would be a pain to get it. Just interesting to think about.

That's a really good idea - slightly different tha...

2008-08-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

That's a really good idea - slightly different than what I was going for here - but it would require much more complete data than I now have. Here I just looked exclusively at the predictive power of preseason rankings because I only had the preseason rankings for future national champions (and then I could assume the rankings for the non-national champions because teams would fall in the preseason poll everywhere the future champs weren't (if that makes any sense). That's why I looked only at the probability of winning a national championship.

To do what you're talking about I would need complete rankings with names attached (and then I could match them to historical performance rankings that I have on hand). I would either need to enter it into excel as a data set by hand (which I'm not willing to do) or find a .csv file online somewhere. But I would be interested in seeing what comes out (my guess is that preseason rankings would have no effect for major conference teams and a moderate effect for mid-major teams).

I wish I could edit comments.

Perhaps you c...

2008-08-20T23:47:00.000-04:00

I wish I could edit comments.

Perhaps you could include another variable or two that tried to proxy for team skill -- points for, points against, or pythagorean winning percentage. Then see how important the preseason ranking is.

But we would expect the #1 team to be better than ...

2008-08-20T23:45:00.000-04:00