Fix The BCS

Here is an article on Borda count that is used in the BCS voting. This is really an issue because it causes the top teams to be always on top, and it allows one vote to totally change someones rankings. This guy proposes switching to a voting system that allows the actual BCS officials to monitor votes, thus allowing some degree of "fairness" instead of letting biased coaches always choose.

http://football.kislanko.com/BCSpolls.html

For those that are not aware how the BCS voting system works, here is a link explaining how it "works" (no one actually knows the complete algorithm) and why it may seem unfair to many (including me) http://sportales.com/football/ncaa-bcs-confusion/

In a nutshell, the BCS ranking system decides who plays in bowl games, rather than letting the actual rank of the team decide which bowl game that team plays. One of the many criteria associated with the ranking is the difficulty of the team's schedule. This became a hot issue in 2006 when there were two undefeated teams in the NCAA, Ohio State and Boise State. However, by the virtue of the toughness of Ohio State's schedule vs Boise State's, Ohio State was invited to the Championship game to play against Florida State instead of Boise State. People believe one of the many reasons is that not only was Ohio State's schedule considered "tougher" a game against Fl State and Ohio St, would draw in more revenue and viewers that Boise State. There are several other examples that had people yelling at the unfairness of the BCS ranking system.

One of the reasons I believe the BCS is probably used is because there are so little games that are played in the football season, 12 in college, compared to other sports such as basketball or baseball. Because there are so many teams and such a limited amount of games, no one can really determine which team is really the best based on their record. Teams playing easier teams and having a perfect record, might in fact be worse than a school playing against really talented teams that has 2 losses. To account for this, the BCS ranking takes into account such thing as schedule toughness. In the NFL, it is easier to go based on pure record since there are only 30 teams and 16 games are played, giving a fairly good indication of how good a team in. In the NCAA, a single state can have 30 teams alone.

Is the Borda count system perfect? Not really, but there aren't that many better alternatives. A majority based human poll would likewise be biased towards teams that have a lot of fan following (like Michigan or Ohio St.) so that wouldn't work. A pure voting scheme based on season record doesn't capture the skill of the team that well either. As we saw in class (Borda count example), even though we may have preference over Z, we chose X to get the biggest payoff. Same thing happens in the NCAA, even though team A has the best record, we choose team C to compete.

To put it frankly, the BCS must go in the aspect of directly determining the championship matchup. By using a Borda count and the computer rankings, it simply cannot correlate the best teams in the country. Year after year there is controversy because of an adjustment in the weights of the BCS, namely how much should the Computer Polls be weighted against Human Polls. The obvious solution is to take as much out of the hands of voters, and into the hands of players.

Simply: Use the Borda Count and the BCS rankings to determine playoff seedings, and then leave it up to the teams to determine and undisputed winner. But money is always an issue and adds an element that simply cannot be tweaked in this model.