Ranking system actually works.

PositionCollege Football - College football

A study of 25 years of data from a major college football poll challenges three strongly held beliefs of many coaches and fans. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the research found that teams are not punished by pollsters for losing late in the season; there is no benefit to playing and beating strong opponents; and the margin of victory does not matter in poll results.

"In the end, what the study really says is that voters in college football polls lake into account winning and losing--and that is about all," claims Trevon Logan, author of the study and assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University, Columbus. "A lot of things that coaches and fans believe turn out not to be true"

Logan assembled the weekly Associated Press poll results for 25 of college football's most prominent programs for the 25 seasons from 1980 to 2004. In all, the data set contains information on more than 6,000 games, including the date of the game, location, final score, opponent's record at the time of the game and at the end of the season, and the team's and opponent's ranking before and after the contest in the AP poll. Teams were ranked by the number of points they received from the AP voters each week.

One of the more surprising findings is that teams are not punished for losing late in the season. In one sense, losing early does help, though. Teams that are beat at the beginning of the campaign have more time to make up lost ground as teams higher in the rankings lose. However, Logan indicates his findings show that pollsters do not punish a team that loses a late-season game by moving it farther down in the rankings compared to a team that loses early In fact, the exact opposite is true.

Logan defines late-season losses as those that occur in the 10th poll week of the season or later, which usually comes in the last week of October or the first week of November. He found that the cushion provided by losing late in the year is around 20% of the value of losing. The results suggest that more than three fourths of AP poll voters rank a team one place higher in their rankings after a late-season loss than they do for an early-season setback.

The study also found that beating a strong opponent--one that has more wins and a higher ranking--did not help a team's ranking any more than beating a weaker foe. However, Logan did find that losing to a strong opponent actually softens the blow of a loss. For example, losing to a team with an 8-3 record actually...

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