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I'm not a Sagarin guy. Never have been. Never will be.

Sagarin has it's place

The eye test works pretty well.

Me neither. Sagarin always has something off the wall that defies logic in his rankings.  In his final rankings last year WVU finished 28 and Kansas St finished 16.

WVU finished 10-3 to KSU's 9-4. Using his own SoS model WVU played the #15 schedule in the country and KSU played the 39th rated.  WVU beat them head to head.  So a better record against a tougher schedule and a H2H win equals out to finishing 12 spots below them?

I know no system is perfect but there have been too many times throughout the years that he has rolls out stuff that leaves me scratching my head.

i hate his sos system. unless i'm confusing him with someone else, he routinely will have an entire single conf in the top 15-20 sos, with 7-8 of the top10 from that conf. there is no way in hell a single conf has that many of the toughest sos. the only thing i can say is i don't see a conf bias. it's been the pac, the b1g, and the bigxii to accomplish that feat that i've seen, and i wouldn't be surprised if the sec and acc have done it as well.

The eye test works pretty well.

My problem with going strictly eye test is that we all trust our own opinion a little more than we should.  At what point should results be factored in? 

A couple of years ago I would have picked USC with its 3 or 4 losses to beat an undefeated Iowa team on a neutral field.  Eye test told me they were better, but should I have ranked them ahead of Iowa?   IMO, no way.  Eye test plus tangible results and hard numbers is the best way to go, imo.

The USC/Iowa example...


In a power ranking, when you think one team is better than the other, then that team should be ranked above the other. That's how power rankings work. It's independent of record. It's about who would win, on a neutral site, TODAY.

True, but that gets conflated. That's part of the reason people get mad at the numbers rankings.

i hate his sos system. unless i'm confusing him with someone else, he routinely will have an entire single conf in the top 15-20 sos, with 7-8 of the top10 from that conf. there is no way in hell a single conf has that many of the toughest sos. the only thing i can say is i don't see a conf bias. it's been the pac, the b1g, and the bigxii to accomplish that feat that i've seen, and i wouldn't be surprised if the sec and acc have done it as well.

If your league had a bunch of top teams, and most of those teams played each other, wouldn't SOS naturally cluster?

The Big Ten has four top ten preseason ranked teams.  That is pretty stout.


We also all understand that some teams will not be as good as expected and vice versa, and that means some conferences will be the same way. 


Georgia is a slight dog at Notre Dame at the moment, but is ranked a fair bit ahead in the polls.  I don't think HFA is that significant, so I wonder if that is the betting public more than a "real line".  I don't think UGA loses to ND this year.  That could be the homer in me. 


Folks are always suspicious of the ACC.  Either they have an overall bad year, or when they have a very good year, folks think "Well, it was a fluke."  They put a lot of guys into the League.  In the past, my read was their teams were soft in the lines.  They'd play other ACC teams that were soft and not realize it. That could be changing.  Clemson stood up to Alabama who few would consider soft, and seemed to handle Ohio State reasonably well.


Since claiming we'll know more in a few weeks is a cop out, I'll GUESS the B1G is the top dog at the moment.  I suspect either LSU or Auburn might be pretty good, I don't know which.  It looks like Florida or Georgia in the East, which probably means South Carolina wins the division.