Skynet Championship Series 2007

Last year, I introduced the Skynet Championship Series (SCS). The purpose of the SCS is to determine what the objective computer believes is the top college football teams in the country. Last year, I had based the SCS rankings on three factors to duplicate the 2003 BCS formula: (A) strength of schedule, (B) losses, and (C) 4 of the 6 computer rankings (to see the computer rankings check out this link).

As last season progressed, I realized that penalizing for losses and strength of schedule was duplicative of the computer rankings themselves, and by the end of the season, I dropped the strength of schedule component. So, this year, I’ve decided the most fair thing to do is just use straight computer rankings to determine the Skynet Championship Series, and also eliminate the additional penalty for losing a game. I’ve also decided to include the top 20 teams this year, mainly because it appears that division 1 is destined to have all one-loss teams. Just like last year though, I have eliminated two of the current computer rankings, the Billingsley ranking and the Massey rating, because they both start with a Human ranking of the teams 1-117. No human bias is allowed in the SCS!

While no human bias is allowed in the SCS, the Colley rankings have a SWEET new feature where you can add new games and remove previous games to figure out what the rankings might be! No human bias is involved, but you can still play god from your very own computer!

So, to be clear, here’s how I devise the standings each week:
1) I take the top 20 of the BCS standings.
2) I input each of the top 20's computer standings from each computer ranking.
3) I let excel calculate the standard deviation for each computer ranking distribution of the top 20. Then, Excel normalizes the distribution, and fits EACH computer ranking onto a 1-20 scale.
4) Finally, the normalized-computer averages are determined (i.e. Florida is ranked 5.76, 2.55, 2.21, 5.77 in 4 of the polls, which is an average of 4.07, which equals their SCS ranking. This means that according to the polls, they are approximately the 4th-best team in the country).

Without further ado, here are the week 1 standings:
Editor’s note: there are now only 3 computer rankings included, because Anderson refuses to publish his rankings this year.

2007 - Week of 10/14
.........................SCS........BCS
1. So. Florida......0.45........(2)
2. LSU.................1.70........(4)
3. S. Carolina......2.69........(6)
4. Kentucky........3.51........(7)
5. Arizona St.......4.41........(8)
6. Boston Col.......4.51........(3)
7. Ohio St............5.55.........(1)
8. Kansas............9.10.........(13)
9. Va. Tech.........9.42.........(11)
10. W. Va. ..........9.77..........(9)
11. Oklahoma..12.10..........(5)
12. Oregon........13.58.........(10)
13. Virginia......13.93.........(19)
14. Auburn......14.22.........(17)
15. Missouri....14.55.........(16)
16. California...14.93........(12)
17. Hawaii.......16.51.........(18)
18. Georgia.....16.75.........(20)
19. Florida......17.21.........(15)
20. USC...........18.98........(14)