Comments on College Football by the Numbers: Ranking high: scientific proof that preseason poll...

Makes sense. Was the preseason rankings coefficien...

2009-08-30T00:57:23.863-04:00

Makes sense. Was the preseason rankings coefficient still significant? Maybe it just had not much effect at all. I agree that hardly any non-BCS teams are ranked in both places so it makes it tough to work with.

In any case, your takeaway seems correct -- the preseason rankings affect things in an irritating and unjust way, but not a huge way. Still, it's aggravating to see teams keep their ranking position as long as they don't lose. That's the lamest way of ranking teams but no one has the guts to shuffle things around week to week. Oh well.

Matt, I tried it out, but I ran into a little prob...

2009-08-29T17:36:16.396-04:00

Matt, I tried it out, but I ran into a little problem. When I include the interaction term, it is positive and significant, meaning that preseason ranking is even more important for BCS conference teams, but it flips the sign for preseason rankings, so that it now has a negative coefficient. One interpretation is that preseason rankings are good for BCS teams but bad for non BCS teams . . . or we could just recognize that with so few non BCS teams being ranked in the pre and post season, the interaction term is giving us problems with multicollinearity. I think the more reasonable interpretation is the latter and that the model is no longer valid with the interaction term.

Interesting work, nice job. Add an interaction ter...

2009-08-29T01:01:36.153-04:00

Interesting work, nice job. Add an interaction term between BCSConf and PreRank? That should nail that group of teams you are looking at with the large residuals.