Nebraska 25th in final Coaches Poll, 26th in AP

[JTrain]

UCF played no one... just like Boise State,,, sometimes a team with a month to prepare can surprise the favored team.... Baylor gave no respect to UCF during it's bowl preparations, it showed during the game.. no disrespect towards ucf, but if they played in a real conference, they would not have been in the position they were.... give them credit for winning, but to rank them 10th is pathetic...

 

I'll address this portion and ignore that old-people-comic-sans-mass-email style of your writing, as well as the bizarre political rant.

 

There is a Head-to-Head Fallacy that most people intuitively believe in: If two teams with similar or equal records play each other, the winner must be ranked ahead of the loser in a fair ranking system. This is totally false. The ranking depends on the whole season, of which the head-to-head game is but one small part. The winner of the head-to-head may move ahead of the loser, assuming their other results led to a rating close enough to the loser's. But if not, they may very well rightly still be ranked behind the loser. So your conclusion is right (even if you didn't get to it for the right reasons). Each game is of equal weight and you can not look at one result in a vacuum and then try to modify your whole system to fit that result. The fallacy becomes clear when you look at three teams that beat each other (think rock, paper, scissors).

 

All games count towards the final ranking but you can not throw arbitrary value on one game result to try to force the whole system to match your intuition. Yet the intuition is so strong that pollsters inevitably do this all the time, trying force a team like UCF above Baylor because of that one game. If you look at unbiased systems that weigh all results equally, the UCF win over Baylor will certainly help UCF and hurt Baylor, but it won't just shoot UCF up as many spots as it takes to get above Baylor, crashing the logic of the entire system. When looked at as a whole, Baylor's season was a better accomplishment than UCF's. That includes the game between the two, but it also includes all other 25 games with equal weight.

 

http://masseyratings.../cf/compare.htm

[Guy Chamberlin]

Near as I can tell, a substantial percentage of Nebraska fans dislike any national entity that expresses an opinion on college football.

[sd'sker]

Near as I can tell, a substantial percentage of Nebraska fans dislike any national entity that expresses an opinion on college football.

and local entity.

[Excel]

Mizzou and South Carolina are a bit too high. Leaving auburn at two is something I actually agree with but this has to be about the first time in history it has happened. Do you think if Msu somehow was in the title game and lost a close game that auburn would stay at 3?

 

How is South Carolina too high? The Gamecocks beat three other top 10 teams this season. Mizzou, Clemson and UCF. No other team did that.