With last night’s unique, electric, and egalitarian college football championship game behind us we figured it was time to pull out our RTC BCS Poll. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, we are applying the BCS formula to college basketball to see what the results would be if college basketball had a BCS system instead of actually deciding a champion on the court. We have done this each of the past three years. Here are the results from 2009, 2010, and 2011. The posts are from various points in the season (either midway through the year or potentially at the end of the regular season) This year we are going to try to expand it out a little further and track the changes essentially from the start of conference play.

The rules are essentially the same as the BCS and as in previous years (with a few upgrades):

1. We are following the BCS Football guidelines as closely as possible, but we replaced the Notre Dame rule with the Duke rule since they both have sketchy TV contracts (Notre Dame with NBC and Duke with ESPN).
2. The AP and ESPN/USA Today polls are used as the human polls and RPI, Sagarin, Pomeroy, Massey, Colley, and LRMC as the computer polls. The human poll scores are calculated as a fraction (in decimal form) of the percentage of possible votes (1625 in the AP and 775 in the ESPN/USA Today respectively). Like the BCS we remove the highest and lowest computer rankings from a team’s overall computer ranking. The highest and lowest rankings are noted with green and red boxes. In the even that there were multiple similar highest or lowest scores we picked the first one in chart.
3. We used the traditional BCS calculations for determining each team’s score weighing the two human polls and the combined computer poll average as 1/3 of a team’s total score each.

Here are your Week 1 RTC BCS rankings (click on the image to enlarge):

If you are trying to figure out the computer rankings, they are reflecting the points awarded (25 points for #1, 24 for #2, etc). When a team is not in the top 25 of a computer ranking they are given zero points.

A few things jump out at us right away. The computers seem to love Alabama, but not Michigan at least compared to the human polls. Out of the so-called “contenders”, the computers are really high on Syracuse (no surprise with their undefeated record), but do not like UNC or Baylor. Within the computer rankings there are some interesting nuggets:

• As we are all aware Ken Pomeroy loves Wisconsin. The Badgers didn’t even make the RTC Top 25, but Ken still has them at #2 in his poll. He published an interesting explanation/defense on his site yesterday. LRMC also has the Badgers at #8.
• Like many fans and writers, the computers are not sure what to do with Connecticut. Two polls have them in the top 5 while another has them at #23 and the three others do not even have them in the top 25.
• Almost everybody loves UNC except for the RPI poll, which has them at #22.
• In addition to Wisconsin, there were a few teams that did not crack the RTC BCS Top 25 that still managed to make quite an impression in more than one computer ranking including Illinois (13th in RPI and 15th in Colley), St. Louis (11th in Pomeroy and 16th in LRMC).

As for the actual match-ups:

• Sugar Bowl: #6 Indiana versus #10 Kansas. A classic match-up of two of the blue bloods of the sport that would generate a ton of hype. Indiana would be the Sugar Bowl’s selection to replace Kentucky (the SEC Champion) that is in the Championship Game while the Sugar Bowl Committee would certainly take the Jayhawks traveling fan base over Missouri. While the Tigers fans may complain, they would not have the biggest beef here. That honor would belong to Murray State, which would get shutout of the BCS despite being undefeated.
• Rose Bowl: #3 Ohio State versus California. The Bears make this game as the Pac-12 representative with an automatic bid despite finishing 37th in the rankings as they narrowly edge out #39 Stanford on the strength of their 0.04 computer ranking (with no human votes). This would be an awful game, but it could give the Buckeyes plenty of reason to complain about being left out of the BCS Championship Game.
• Fiesta Bowl: #5 Baylor versus #12 UNLV. The Rebels get in as an automatic bid as a team from the Mountain West Conference that finished in the top 12 of the BCS rankings. The Fiesta Bowl would be the ideal destination as it is close enough for their fans to make the trip and it would make for a very interesting interior match-up (Perry Jones against Mike Moser).
• Orange Bowl: #4 North Carolina versus #8 Duke. A rematch for potentially the fourth time sounds pretty dumb, but this is the BCS that we are talking about. UNC is an automatic bid as the ACC Champion and the Orange Bowl would get the first pick of non-committed teams because they lost the Big East Champion and #1 overall team to the BCS Championship Game. The executives couldn’t pass up on the Duke crowd and hotel sales so we have Duke-UNC #4.
• BCS Championship Game: #1 Syracuse versus #2 Kentucky. Ok. We will give the BCS this one. It isn’t UNC-Kentucky that everybody has been talking about since the summer, but we could live with this match-up.

nvr1983 (1398 Posts)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 3:30 pm by nvr1983 and is filed under bcs poll, Regular Features. Tagged: alabama, baylor, california, connecticut, duke, feature, illinois, indiana, kansas, kentucky, michigan, missouri, murray state, north carolina, notre dame, ohio state, st louis, stanford, syracuse, uconn, unc, unlv, wisconsin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.