Latest Sagarin Rankings from 10/31

Nuance, that's a good point, but if Sagarin did that (made a human decision to move Nebraska ahead of Missouri) then he'd eliminate the integrity of his rankings. He has to follow his formula no matter what, or it loses meaning.

 
When you are ranking all 120 (or however many) teams, I don't see how you can consider head-to-head. Or, what you are really doing is considering head-to-head in every single game, which means that while our win over Missouri should seem to put us ahead of them, our loss to Texas yanked us below Missouri. It just doesn't make any season to look at all of the teams and the whole season to position all of the teams, and then say, "Oh yeah, plus I want to give more weight to that NU win over MU". Why would you do that?
If two teams end up adjacent in rankings and grade out within 1.5 percent, then it would make sense to put the team that just defeated the other on top--wouldn't it? I'm just saying that a human voter would probably always put NU over Mizzou if they graded out closely.
I hear what you are saying, but it doesn't make sense to me to rank all teams based on all games, and then take one single game out of the season and put additional weight on it. There's a case for saying Missouri-Nebraska should mean more than Idaho-Nebraska, but then you get into whether 1.5% is the correct margin to flip them, or what is? And again if you go back to that FSU-Miami-Washington scenario, do you look at the Miami-Washington game and flip them, or the FSU-Miami game and flip them, or what? Do you jump Washington over FSU based on head-to-head when they didn't even play each other? Wash over Miami and ignore FSU-Miami since they're no longer adjacent? Or Miami over FSU and ignore Washington's win over Miami since they're no longer adjacent?

I agree that a human voter would do it just about every time. In many situations that may be right. You probably wouldn't if it was the first game of the season and the losing team thrashed everyone else on their schedule, or had injuries or a bunch of terrible calls went against them in that game.

This is one good thing about the BCS ratings. The computers have a totally objective view. The humans can take whatever they want into account. The humans can balance out what the computers didn't take into account. The computers have a better capability for considering everything and not just doing a knee jerk vote on what just happened the day before.

 
it comes down to this, we are the better team, they have the better season (so far). tough to judge who is better, thus a playoff would be appropriate.

 
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