Everyone else has a solution for the BCS, so why can't we?

NCAA institutions are a varied lot: both private and public, both large and small, both teaching-oriented and research-oriented, both colleges and universities. However, without doing the research, there is at least one thing that I am certain every single one of them has: a professor of statistics.

The Michigan Statistics Department has an awesome logo. That is all.

In this post we will discuss two of the many problems with the BCS. The first is that there are humans involved in the formula who are swayed by things such as "brand name," "reputation," and "whatever bullshit Gary Danielson spews during the fourth quarter of the SEC Championship game." Vishnu Parasuraman at Grantland proposes replacing the polls with a committee. The only effect that would have is that the biases of "brand name," "reputation," and "Gary Danielson" would be hidden in a board room in Indianapolis instead of being out in the open for us to mock. Lloyd Carr is the sort of person who'd be on the selection committee, and he's already a Harris Poll voter. You don't see the NCAA putting Ken Pomeroy on the March Madness committee.

This is not to say that computers are unbiased; the second problem with the BCS is that the computer rankings are hobbled and slanted by the silly biases of Jeff Sagarin, Peter Wolfe, Wesley Colley, Kenneth Massey, Richard Billingsley, and some dudes at the Seattle Times (a.k.a. Seattle's fourth best newspaper, behind the Stranger, the Weekly, and the Sinner). Only six. That's ridiculous.

My solution to these problems: no more committees, no more polls. Only computers. But not just six computers, that's not enough! In order to come up with a reasonable BCS computer ranking formula, we need hundreds of rankings. Every school in the NCAA should be invited to submit a team ranking system before the start of the season, and the official football rankings should be a combination of hundreds of rankings created by the smartest statistics students at all of the NCAA's member institutions.

Here's the plan. After the jump.