We have this crazy system where a bunch of lazy writers vote every week and come up with rankings. Everyone has their own team so the entire system is subjective. Some people just hate a team and might pull them down.

Since we are all so AI-smart these days and import so many foreign geniuses, why not have a system where data is entered into a computer and it puts out rankings? It should take into consideration the strength of schedule so no team thinks it can get away by playing cream puffs. Also, the recency factor won't be a thing unless it is programmed to behave that way.

That way everything is on the up and up and no one feels cheated or victimized. Tennis does it since 1972. Other sports also do.

Maybe Elon Musk can help out.

The computers would have us lower than the humans.

There is no way to rank anything perfectly when 136 teams play in the same division, but only for 12 games.

College Football was better before all we cared about was the MNC

The only solution to stop all the bs is to make leagues with 8-10 teams. Top two teams from each league go to the playoff.

If you are third place in the toughest conf., tough ***** You had your chance to be 1 or 2 and you failed.

Get all the opinions out of the sport and let the players and coaches prove it. That's what sports are supposed to be. If you like sporting events based on opinions, go watch snow boarding, gymnastics, and figure skating.

If you want algorithms to tell you who is good or not., just hang out in insta.

Personally, I think because they want to manipulate the same four teams all the time. I would think a computer would make it more fair, but some of the other points made on this thread are good too. Who knows.

This isn't tennis; college football is too unstable. The compete failure of the transitive property as a predictive tool demonstrates the problem. Even if you had an omniscient ranking of the best teams, it would change week to week because these are large numbers of mostly teenagers playing with all of their drama, plus in season development, injuries, changes in team chemistry. Then you have scheme/personnel matchup issues where team A beats B who beats C who beats A even with all else being equal.

Take you pick!

Our computers showed up early this week, giving us this speedy Sunday simulated BCS. Let's take a look at each algo's top 12: pic.twitter.com/VsUb38FmBf

— BCSKnowHow.com (@BCSKnowHow) November 30, 2025

He is Ass My Dude said:

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The only solution to stop all the bs is to make leagues with 8-10 teams. Top two teams from each league go to the playoff.

If you are third place in the toughest conf., tough ***** You had your chance to be 1 or 2 and you failed.

Get all the opinions out of the sport and let the players and coaches prove it. That's what sports are supposed to be. If you like sporting events based on opinions, go watch snow boarding, gymnastics, and figure skating.

If you want algorithms to tell you who is good or not., just hang out in insta.

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The closest college football got to having a good post-season system was 2010. Force the PAC-10 to take two more programs, and the conferences would have been reasonably balanced and regional.

All we needed was an 8 team playoff of the 5 major conference champs, highest ranked other conference champ, and a couple at-large to round it out and keep SEC and Notre Dame happy. It would be a hell of a lot better than the mess we have now.

That wasn't going to happen, so I'm glad A&M made it to the SEC.

I would prefer no leagues at all. You play completely randomized schedule every year. G5 and P4 stay separate. That maximizes your chances of actually having all the best teams make the playoff.

Computers are built by corporations, and we can't have that.

Maybe there's some enterprising person out there who got straight A's in Computer Engineering through grad school but is now working as a barista who could try one of these?

Or hell, maybe we just ask one of the guys who posts here who says he makes 6 figures a month to rank the teams?

The point of having a computer rank the teams is that you'd have a set of rules that would apply to any team without caring who the teams are.

Sure, you could program the computer to give the whorns a +2 advantage, but you could also publish the program used so that anyone could see how it works, run it, and get the same results.

Guy12 said:

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Because they'll have to choose a particular algorithm and that will ultimately be subjective. Which model do you use? What defines quality wins and quality losses versus bad wins and bad losses?

If there was an objective answer to these questions, we'd already have one centralized and accepted ranking.

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You don't use just one model, you use several, drop the highest and lowest ranking for each team and then add up the rest

So if there are 8 systems, each teams highest and lowest rankings are thrown out and then you add up your other 6 rankings and the lowest total score number 1, next is number 2 etc…

That way any biases can be offset by other rankings and any systems that have a wonky ranking too high or too low for a team are not used

The first iteration of the bcs did that

Computer average would be:

1. Ohio state
2. Indiana
3. Oregon
4. UGA
5. Ole miss
6. A&M
7. Tech
8. Bama
9. BYU
10. Notre dame
11. OU
12. Vandy

When Texas gets left out (and ESPECIALLY if Notre Dame also gets left out), I can guarantee there will be significant changes to how playoff teams are determined. Whether it's computers or not requiring G5 teams or whatever. Things will change.

Bcs was far preferable to the current system. The playoff sucks, but it makes money so im just screaming into the void.

King of the Dairy Queen said:

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Bcs was far preferable to the current system. The playoff sucks, but it makes money so im just screaming into the void.

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very fake news

It has been forgotten that with the BCS (ie computer involved rankings) the criteria used to generate the results on the computer ranking was "tweaked" almost every year it seemed like. All because of X or Y scenario they did not originally account for so the next year had to adjust for.

So to me "just use computers" is not a magic "fix all".

If it was solely up to the computers, Texas would pay hackers to weight the computer rankings in favor of the sips.

Quote:

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Bcs was far preferable to the current system. The playoff sucks, but it makes money so im just screaming into the void.

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The current system would be much better if they'd just do away with any automatic qualifiers, and playoff the top eight teams.

That would mean fewer games, so it will never happen.

The first thing that needs to happen is to have zero rankings until part way into the season which the current playoff committee does, however we all know they rely on the AP and Coaches to establish their baseline in the first place because they largely have no idea what they are doing.

You have preseason rankings which, now more than ever, are complete horse**** in the era of NIL where you have massive roster turnover every year. I realize you can't really stop preseason rankings and somehow sequester the playoff committee from seeing them. So, the initial playoff committee rankings should at least use a computer formula that does not factor the AP or Coaches poll. Maybe it does and I'm just ignorant of the process but I don't think they do this.

Problem with any algorithm is once people learn the formulas to compute the rankings, coaches and ADs will learn how to play to that algorithm, instead of just playing pure football. It corrupts the game more than NIL has already. With AI now mainstream, you just plug in the algorithm formula, team strengths, opponents, and run infinite number of what-if scenarios to see which one produces the highest ranking. Maybe that's just me thinking since I design large scale automation software.

King of the Dairy Queen said:

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Bcs was far preferable to the current system. The playoff sucks, but it makes money so im just screaming into the void.

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Bcs is far better than a committee at ranking. The problem was only 2 teams got in.

I always felt a 6 or 8 team playoff was perfect size. 12 is pretty good. We don't want it any bigger imo.

dabo man said:

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Quote:

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Bcs was far preferable to the current system. The playoff sucks, but it makes money so im just screaming into the void.

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The current system would be much better if they'd just do away with any automatic qualifiers, and playoff the top eight teams.

That would mean fewer games, so it will never happen.

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Perfection!

infinity ag said:

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We have this crazy system where a bunch of lazy writers vote every week and come up with rankings. Everyone has their own team so the entire system is subjective. Some people just hate a team and might pull them down.

Since we are all so AI-smart these days and import so many foreign geniuses, why not have a system where data is entered into a computer and it puts out rankings? It should take into consideration the strength of schedule so no team thinks it can get away by playing cream puffs. Also, the recency factor won't be a thing unless it is programmed to behave that way.

That way everything is on the up and up and no one feels cheated or victimized. Tennis does it since 1972. Other sports also do.

Maybe Elon Musk can help out.

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See USN&WR college rankings. The methodology reveals the criteria that bakes in a preference for spending more money. Computer rankings areenslaved to true creator's biases.

Now they MIGHT write down their criteria but usually it's hidden in the algorithm which is protected as a trade secret…

Hellcat64 said:

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Problem with any algorithm is once people learn the formulas to compute the rankings, coaches and ADs will learn how to play to that algorithm, instead of just playing pure football. It corrupts the game more than NIL has already. With AI now mainstream, you just plug in the algorithm formula, team strengths, opponents, and run infinite number of what-if scenarios to see which one produces the highest ranking. Maybe that's just me thinking since I design large scale automation software.

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I am a technologist as well and I completely disagree. Technology won't corrupt the game. Humans corrupt this game way more than any poorly designed or implemented AI model. An AI based system determining the end year rankings makes more sense than any group of biased humans.

czar_iv said:

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Hellcat64 said:

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Problem with any algorithm is once people learn the formulas to compute the rankings, coaches and ADs will learn how to play to that algorithm, instead of just playing pure football. It corrupts the game more than NIL has already. With AI now mainstream, you just plug in the algorithm formula, team strengths, opponents, and run infinite number of what-if scenarios to see which one produces the highest ranking. Maybe that's just me thinking since I design large scale automation software.

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I am a technologist as well and I completely disagree. Technology won't corrupt the game. Humans corrupt this game way more than any poorly designed or implemented AI model. An AI based system determining the end year rankings makes more sense than any group of biased humans.

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Humans cannot build an unbiased AI, that's the issue. No matter how it's coded, since its done by humans, it will have a human bias. Determining rankings require human input to decide what factors are to be used and any potential weighting. Those are subjective and determined by humans. AI cannot do that on its own. Its not the same as building AI to a solve a math or physics problem, or do accounting.

Sagarin would have us 8

Sagarin's final rankings are out: 1. Ohio State 2. Indiana 3. Notre Dame 4. Oregon 5. Texas Tech 6. Georgia 7. Miami 8. Texas A&M 9. Alabama 10. Ole Miss 11. Vanderbilt 12. Texas 13. Oklahoma 14. Penn State 15. Utah

— BCSKnowHow.com (@BCSKnowHow) December 7, 2025

Computers have as many flaws as humans!

Do you want the nerds who also have bias creating the algorithm?

Computers cant determine espn bias

oneeyedag said:

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Computers cant determine espn bias

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Yes they can.

Get rid of conference championship games.

Conferences decided championships for decades without them.

There are too many games for top teams.

Whatever Vegas does seems pretty damn effective.
Maybe talk with whoever develops THEIR stuff

For the same reason we don't computer-generate voting districts... the money/power wants it done differently.

lol. So much for Sagarin being gold standard. What idiocy having Ohio State above Indiana.