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My New Computer Poll - Updated with Your Suggestions

+17 HS
Kentuckeye51's picture
October 30, 2019 at 9:26am
26 Comments

For reference, here is yesterday's forum, which goes in to quite a bit of detail on what this is and is also the catalyst for these changes: https://www.elevenwarriors.com/forum/college-sports/2019/10/108271/a-new...

Now, I've made the updates to my poll that I said that I would and it has produced a slight-but-noticeable change to the results that y'all ought to see before I post the Week 10 poll and I get a bunch of questions about how we went up by 10 points on a bye week.

Here are the changes:

1. Reduced the win % multiplier. I was multiplying win % by 500 (so an undefeated team started with 500 points), but that was a bit overpowered and Appalachian State was bumped ahead of, say, Georgia, who is - probably - a better team than App State. Thank you to Sumaic for suggesting this change.

2. Changed all stats from Yards/Game to Yards/Play. This kind of corrects the possibility of weird outliers hurting my accuracy. Let's take two random examples... Say Utah State were to beat Hawai'i because they started all their drives inside Hawai'i's 35-yard line with turnovers and such, then Utah State would have actually been penalized for that performance. Thank you to Spartan13 and NavyBuckeye91 for suggesting this change.

3. Added Scoring Differential as a factor. This is a good stat, and I do like using it here. My biggest hurdle was finding a site that supplied it but thank you to QuadCitiesBuckeye for kicking me hard enough on this one for me to do some more digging and find it. https://www.teamrankings.com/college-football/stat/average-scoring-margin is what I'm using for this.

Also, to make it a bit more useful I have defined a Max and a Min rating. In theory these should be the best possible team and the worst possible team. I used the NCAA records for turnover margin, penalties/game, etc and built the best ever team and now that is a perfect 100 on this scale. The worst possible team is a -30.5. Not sure what I did to make that last one as janky as it is, but I seriously doubt I will ever have a team actually go in to the negatives, so I'm not too concerned. 

Now for the changes to the rankings. 

1. Ohio State (73.36)                No Change (from yesterday)
2. LSU (67.57)                          +1 
3. Penn State (67.44)                -1
4. Clemson (66.48)                   No Change
5. SMU (65.12)                         No Change
6. Alabama (65.07)                   No Change
7. Baylor (63.62)                       No Change
8. Minnesota (62.90)                 No Change
9. Georgia (61.74)                    +3
10. App State (61.71)                -1
11. Oklahoma (60.28)               No Change
12. Cincinnati (60.19)               +2
13. Utah (60.14)                       +2
14. Oregon (59.82)                   +2
15. Navy (59.33)                       -2
16. Florida (59.11)                     -6
17. Wisconsin (58.65)               +2
18. Memphis (58.22)                 -1
19. Boise State (56.78)             +2
20. Louisiana Tech (55.90)        +5
21. TTUN (55.71)                      +1
22. Wake Forest (55.65)            -2
23. Auburn (55.50)                     -5
24. Iowa (54.75)                         No Change
25. San Diego State (54.35)      -2

Our next two opponents:
100. Maryland                            -5
116. Rutgers                              +2

The worst team has flipped again thanks to these changes...
130. New Mexico State              -1 (Good job Akron, you're not the worst anymore!)

A few additional fun notes:

1. One thing I still think is really interesting here is that I have Clemson so highly ranked even though their schedule is awful... they apparently are performing really well even when factoring that in. The only other ACC team in the top 25 is Wake Forest and the next highest it Virginia Tech at #43.

2. Also, how about Cincinnati?! I know I'm not the only computer poll to rank them this high but my goodness you'd think losing to us 42-0 would make them look bad but I guess not.

3. SMU might be legit. I can't get them out of my top 5 without screwing with the stats hard enough to make me feel dirty. I've had them at #5 since week 7, and they've been in my top ten since week 5, so maybe it is time to buy in to this SMU team? Something doesn't feel right about it, but idk what to do about it at this point... maybe they are for real.

4. I think Louisiana Tech is having the quietest best decade ever. They are always better than people give them credit for and nobody talks about them as a top tier G5 team. Now I have them at #20. The AP poll only gave them 6 points and a spot in the "others receiving votes" category. The Bulldogs are a perennial bowl team and I'm amazed nobody has tried to hire Skip Holtz away from them.

Anyway, wanted to give you all an update. If you have more suggestions please do let me know, and thank you for your ideas so far!

This is a forum post from a site member. It does not represent the views of Eleven Warriors unless otherwise noted.

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