One small step towards college football clarity…

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No sport has a more contentious championship structure, in all the world, than American college football. We give control over the championship to a complicated structure called the “BCS” which combines the result of two subjective polls with a bunch of complicated computer ratings which no one knows how they work and wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. This system eventually spits out two teams who are supposed to be “the best” and play each other, and we call the winner the champion.

It’s a lot better than the old system, where we just took a poll to determine the champion. USC-Texas in 2005-06 would never have happened under that system; USC would have played in the Rose Bowl and Texas in the Cotton or Fiesta bowls. Unfortunately, years like that are the exception and not the rule. When there are exactly two undefeated teams, the BCS’ job is easy. When there isn’t, controversy is basically unavoidable. Everyone thinks we should have a real playoff, but no one can get it done.

In the meantime, I have my own addition to the college football rating pantheon.

We can’t trust polls. Polls have short memories, are biased, are impressed by running up the score, are sentimental, and are often based on things other than what happens on the field. In the first few years of the BCS, people blamed computer polls for problems picking champions, in part because almost all computer poll formulae are proprietary. Often they shrugged off strength of schedule as though we should reward teams for playing a bunch of scrubs. Auburn’s inability to make the national title game in 2004-05, despite going undefeated, showed that polls can cause problems as well. A computer ranking can at least claim a modicum of objectivity by being based in fairly sound mathematical principles.

Of course, I don’t have enough grounding in mathematics to have a good grasp of sound mathematical principles, but I have read a number of resources. Many of them are here. Some articles on the thinking going into many of these systems are here. Soren Sorensen’s thinking on these matters, which has affected my own judgment, is here.

My rating is a three-part system that aims to unify and minimize the problem with various systems.

A Rating. This is a basic rating on a scale of 0 to 1. 0 means you’ve been shut out in all games, while 1 means you’ve been beaten in all games. When I was first formulating this I had the results effectively multiplied based on the team’s Coaches and AP Poll results. I would add 1/r (where r is the rank) times the A Rating. The result was a 0 to 3 scale. I dumped it due to increased disillusionment with the polls and the fact that a scrub team was actually helped in the B Rating by getting blown out by a team with an A Rating over 1.

The A Rating is calculated as a team’s winning percentage times a team’s modified average score ratio. According to Sorensen, a team’s score ratio in a given game is the margin of victory divided by the winning score. For the loser, score ratio is the negative margin of loss divided by the losing score. Since the score ratio for shutouts is always 1, and the score ratio for blowouts approaches 1, score ratio serves as a check to running up the score. (However, it also is somewhat biased towards defense. If you’re beating up your opponent 50-3 and your opponent kicks another field goal, you have to get to 100 points to make up the score ratio lost!)

For A Rating purposes, the average score ratio is modified to a 0-1 scale instead of a -1 to 1 scale. Under this system, ties would have score ratio of .5.

B Rating. B Rating is calculated by multipling a team’s A Rating by its total B Points. If the total B Points are negative, teams would be helped by lower A Ratings, so the A Rating is subtracted from 1 before multipling. Because having positive B Points results in a “purer” calculation, I give special recognition to all such teams on my report.

B Points are earned on a game-by-game basis and are supposed to be determined by the following game-by-game formula: MoV*AR+/-1

where MoV reflects the margin of victory or loss (negative for a loss), AR reflects the opponent’s A Rating (subtracted from 1 for a loss), and the +/- 1 factor is a home field modifier. It adds 1 to games played on the road and subtracts 1 from games played at home. For games played on a neutral site, B Points are simply MoV*AR. B Points are recalculated from scratch every week.

This uses “pure” MoV, but it still mitigates the effect of RUTS by multipling it by the A Rating. Who you have a given result against matters. I believe ratings should relate MoV to quality of teams beaten. If you beat up on a terrible team, the B Points you receive for it will be negligible. If you RUTS on a one-loss team with fantastic score ratio, just the fact you were able to run up the score on a terrific team says volumes about the quality of your team. (Most computer rankings, in their zeal to curb RUTS, will give most of this game’s impact to the quality of win.)

However, in practice, this is not the actual formula. I use Access 2003 to calculate the ratings and for some unknown reason, it highballs the ratings to a ridiculous extent. I have isolated the problem to the summation of the B Points, to prepare them for calculation in the B Rating. At this point, an unknown factor will cause the summation to be far higher than the individual games’ B Points would indicate. (It is related to the existence of multiple games, as the B Points sum correctly when there’s only one of them, but skyrocket immediately after a second game appears.) I would like to believe the results scale to what they should be but I am concerned about undervaluing the A Rating in calculating B Rating. As an example, consider the B Points earned by Ohio State in the 2006 season. I have manually sorted the results by date and rounded B Points to the hundredths place.

OSU def. Northern Illinois 35-12: 5.81 points
OSU def. Texas 24-7: 9.69 points
OSU def. Cincinatti 37-7: 9.44 points (Cincinnati had a rather strong season and Texas, while clearly better, wasn’t at championship form without Vince Young)
OSU def. Penn State 28-6: 8.37 points
OSU def. Iowa 38-17: 6.14 points
OSU def. Bowling Green 35-7: 2.46 points (the value of B Points in curbing RUTS against weak opposition should be obvious)
OSU def. Michigan State 38-7: 5.54 points
OSU def. Indiana 44-3: 5.48 points
OSU def. Minnesota 44-0: 9.33 points
OSU def. Illinois 17-10: 1.42 points (that’s what you get for keeping an absolutely atrocious team within a touchdown)
OSU def. Northwestern 54-10: 6.94 points
OSU def. Michigan 42-39: .86 points (yes, Michigan was undefeated at the time, but thumbs down to letting them get within a field goal at home – B Points are capped at MoV)
Florida def. Ohio State 41-14: -8.92 points (for destroying what was to that point the best team in the land, Florida received nearly 20 points for this game)

These B Points should add up to 62.57 points. But Access records OSU’s total B Points as 94162.35. (The final B Rating was 69160.71. After Week 3, OSU’s B Rating was 4237.39.) The only thing I tell Access to do in the query in question is sum up the B Points. For reference, OSU’s A Rating was .735, and their opponents received the following B Points for their OSU games: Northern Illinois -5.10, Texas -5.51, Cincinnati -6.95, Penn State -4.83, Iowa -6.57, Bowling Green -6.42, Michigan State -9.22, Indiana -9.87, Minnesota -10.66 (OSU shutting out Minnesota hurt the Gophers more than it helped the Buckeyes), Illinois -2.86, Northwestern -12.66, Michigan .20 (it is possible to earn positive B Points for losing, but it has to be on the road), Florida 19.84. If anyone can point out what I can do differently to get Access to calculate total B Points correctly, let me know. (My query that calculates individual game B Points has one field for the team itself, and to aid Access in association, two fields for the opponent, one of which is taken from the base list of Division I-A teams. I am willing to e-mail my Access file to anyone interested in tackling the problem. A link to my e-mail should be available from the profile link at right.)

C Rating. B Points do not take into account the unbalanced college football schedule. A team in a non-BCS conference can crush a bunch of scrubs and have its B Rating artificially inflated because the scrubs win more than they deserve by playing other scrubs in conference. This reduces the RUTS-mitigating effect of B Points. C Rating is a simple modification of B Rating that takes into account conference strength.

Each conference has a conference rating, which is simply the average of its component teams’ B Ratings. Independents are considered their own individual conferences, except Army and Navy, which are considered to comprise a “military” conference. (For clarification, the other two independents, Notre Dame and Western Kentucky, are their own one-team conferences, named after themselves.)

To calculate C Rating, take the difference between a team’s B Rating and its conference’s rating. Multiply that number by n/120, where n is the number of teams in conference. (The significance of 120 is that 120 is the total number of teams in Division I-A. Thus the fraction represents the portion of Division I-A that the conference takes up.) Drag the B Rating towards the conference rating by that amount. (If the B Rating is bigger, subtract. If the conference rating is bigger, add.)

Note that, to take my comment on the OSU-Minnesota game above, this serves as another curb on RUTS. RUTS too much in conference and you are liable to hurt the conference rating by punishing your opponent’s B Rating, and thus hurt your own C Rating.

All three of these algorithms have their faults. A Rating does not factor in SoS at all, B Points theoretically give some non-diminishing reward for RUTS, and the C Rating algorithm only makes sense as part of a larger system. But taken together, I believe they make a rather strong rating system that aims to crown a champion by C Rating at the end of the season. Last season, it crowned Louisville, with all the warts on the B Rating system, thanks to a woefully underrated Big East that had the highest conference rating. OSU had the best pure B Rating even after losing to Florida. Florida was third and Boise State fourth, separated by only ten points in the C Ratings – 51169.57 to 51159.34.

I won’t release my ratings for the 2007 season until Week 4, the soonest any team can be linked to any other team by connecting a series of games (Team A played Team B played Team C played Team D…). It’s a little arbitrary for my system compared to other systems for which this sort of thing matters, but let’s face it, the ratings are positively meaningless after Week 1 and only slowly coalesce into place. Last year the Week 3 ratings, which occurred after the cutoff point, were almost random, and the Week 4 ratings were more sensical but still a little wild near the bottom. Ratings will be posted on the Web site when they’re ready.

From the "WTF?" file…

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Should people who aren’t paid and just say whatever is on their mind at a given moment because they feel like it – should those people be given a union? Some people think so.

My favorite part is when they say bloggers should get health benefits because it’s such a strenuous profession. All those hours spent staring at a computer screen! Oh, it fries my brain just thinking of some pithy thing to say! And the typing, oh, the typing!

My gripe with CSS

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CSS allows you to have every format rule defined for later use (here “format”
means how things appear). So if you are writing a large website and you want a
consistent appearance for every title, sub-title, how examples of code appear,
how paragraphs are aligned, (I could go on, CSS covers a wide range of
presentation options) then CSS is the way to go.

Let’s say you have a 1200 page website that took you months to complete. Your
current boss gets a promotion and another person fills his place. Your new boss
says to change the font, the size, the background, the appearance of tables,
etc. everywhere on your 1200-page site to comply with some corporate policy. If
you engineered your site appropriately with CSS, you could do this by editing
your CSS file that has all your appearance (format) rules in one place.
(Assuming you used linked stylesheets.)

Or you could do it the hard way, and hammer the appearance changes on each
and every of your 1200 pages. Remember sleep? Your constitutional rights allow
you to take the hard way (this is meant as humor, not an insult).

The above is taken from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/CSS_Programming. CSS is used by most modern web sites to give all pages on it a consistent look and feel, with all the information needed for formatting in a single file.

If it’s so great for formatting, why isn’t it so great for other things? Why should so many sites repeat the same info on every page for elements, like navigation, that are repeated on every page? Suppose, to take Wikibooks’ example, you were told to add a new item to the navigation bar of the site. If the nav bar is in HTML (not Flash), you would have to “hammer the [navigation] changes on each and every of your 1200 pages.”

I should, instead, be able to change a single piece of HTML or CSS and have the changes occur on all pages automatically. Instead, at best you have to rig up some Javascript to apply the changes.

What am I missing here? Is there some easy way to do this (please don’t say “frames”) that I (and evidently a number of others) don’t know about? Is there some reason why formatting should be updated dynamically but other sitewide elements shouldn’t? What’s going on here?

Some recent events – and what they mean for YOU

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I recently had a minor adventure to get a cell phone and get it working.

Yesterday I went to an AT&T store and got a cell phone. It worked fine in the store and when I got home I was quick to try out all the features.

Well, the problem was, when I tried to make a call, it told me I could make “emergency calls only”. I had done nothing to wreck it and nothing I tried fixed it. So today it was back to the AT&T store (I went to one fairly near where I live but got referred to the one I originally went to), got a part changed, and now my phone is making calls.

And the end result is… my web site is now up.

The URL is morganwick.freehostia.com, for those who want to look at it. Yes, I did end up picking FreeHostia over other options including ZendURL.

The hosting poll is over; the project poll is ongoing, though it probably won’t be for long. As you can see, there’s not much on the site right now. Tomorrow, or perhaps later tonight, I’ll try to get something more substantial on there. A while back, in the late 90’s, I fiddled around a lot with HTML and I think I got fairly good at it, but you know what they say about how fast technology knowledge obsoletes, and now I’m completely lost with this newfangled CSS stuff. (I could create web pages with Microsoft Word, but I’d like to get some hot CSS action in to give all or most of my web pages a consistent look. Word would become nearly irrelevant at that point because it probably wouldn’t be able to figure out that I’m going to be shoehorning some prefab CSS in there.)

Also, I still need your input to help build The Best Web Site On The Internet. The generic topic poll will be going up soon. I may decide to stick with Bravenet for it, or I may decide to go someplace else. The 100 Greatest Movies project will probably be one of the first things put up, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be the first. Also, expect some various football-related things to go up over the course of the next month, mostly focused on Da Blog.

As always, if you have suggestions, vote or reply to this post!

A surprising traffic driver to Da Blog… and what it portends for both Da Blog and a web site

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Looking over my traffic logs, I’ve noticed something interesting. A significant portion of traffic to Da Blog, even right now, more than two months after the fact, comes from my Upfront series popping up on web searches.

I have talked about several topics on Da Blog, but I haven’t talked much about the world of TV. It’s evident that if I did, I would be getting a lot more eyeballs. Since signing up with SiteMeter, I’ve never gotten more than four in a day.

On the other hand, I could approach it another way. What can I offer that might come up on a web search, or that people might be looking for? What’s something I have that people might want to read?

Let’s step through the “what should be featured” poll and point out items of interest:

  • Sports Watcher: Eh. I very recently got someone voting for Sports Watcher, so someone likes it, but it’s really just ego-stroking for me. When I was doing it, I don’t think there was a significant group of people coming in and adding their hits just to see it.
  • Rank America’s pro sports leagues: Not very likely to come up on a Google search, but you never know.
  • New method of determining champions: Also not very likely to come up on a Google search, though it’s football I have in mind at the moment, so you never know.
  • Simulated tournament/game: Not bloody likely. Even if I insert myself into a common nerd debate those people are usually already confined to their own message boards.
  • New sports: No.
  • Short poems or stories: No.
  • TV Ratings Reports: Hell yes. I know people are going to be clamoring for these and for the analysis I would bring to them.

So, what else do a large amount of people do? They look for music. They might go to movie sites but I doubt it. They probably are fans of some sport.

Um… actually I don’t know a lot of people and I probably wouldn’t know what’s popular on the Internet if I did.

Here are the top searches on Technorati right now (and no, this is not intentionally pimping to appear on as many hot Technorati searches as possible, but if you came in that way, welcome! Have a look at the two tags attatched to this post and see if you have an opinion on the polls):

  • Noelia. Some pop star with a sex tape, evidently. (rolls eyes)
  • Ron Paul. Well, there’s something. I could take a look at politics. Of course there are a gazillion political blogs out there. But way back at the beginning of the year I was considering doing a ranking of each candidate’s chances. Not sure if I would want or need to do anything like that now. If I had the tools I could have my own little election party on election day. Or I could take a historical look, like ranking the presidents that have come before, but that’s been done a gazillion times as well.
  • Youtube. Who the hell is searching for mention of YouTube on a blog? Well, the leading explanation is that people are looking for softcore porn. (rolls eyes)
  • Harry Potter. In the news for obvious reasons, of course.
  • Twango. Evidently some media sharing site in the news. Or something.
  • iPhone. No, I don’t have one. To hear the news people that must make me the only person on Earth without one. So, stuff in the news, gadgets in the news… didn’t I already decide to focus Da Blog on that sort of thing?
  • Netflix. You know what, I’m just going to scan the rest of the list for something interesting. And… nothing. Well, let’s move on to the Yahoo buzz index:
  • Skip the celebs and Harry Potter…
  • WWE. (jerks around, pulls on collar)
  • Hi-5. Myspace ripoff. I really must be the only person without a Myspace account. There’s also a kids’ show by that name, but I don’t think it has much of an American presence.
  • Transformers. A hot movie. Yawn. There are some things I can do with movies, but to stay completely current? Maybe I should give my Oscar picks.
  • LimeWire. File sharing network. Yawn. Do people not know where these sites are, or at least how to bookmark?
  • Let’s see what the most popular non-search engine or social network or file sharing or anything like that sites are on Alexa:
  • Skip MSN (inherited popularity from IE), YouTube, Myspace, Baidu (a Chinese search engine), and Orkut (Google’s Myspace ripoff).
  • Wikipedia. I just came upon the fallacy of this approach. Wikipedia is about everything, so of course it’s going to get a significant amount of traffic.
  • The aforementioned Hi-5 is among the sites thrown out next.
  • eBay. Wow, that’s still relevant?
  • Amazon.com. Too generic, again.
  • Finally we come upon imdB. Well, if it’s that popular, maybe I should stay the course on my 100 Greatest Movies project.
  • US only, the list goes Yahoo, Google, Myspace, MSN, YouTube, eBay, Facebook, IE’s built in search engine, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Amazon, AOL, Blogger, Go.com (which houses all sorts of Disney-related sites like ESPN, which accounts for more than half of its traffic), and CNN. And I’m back to my comments on the news. imdB is just two spots after that.

Obviously this didn’t work well. But if you have your own opinions, feel free to leave a comment.

Meanwhile you may be wondering when a web site will come. You may find it hard to believe, but I came very close to signing up for it tonight, last night as you read this. I got hung up because, as strange as you may find it to believe, I don’t currently have a phone. But I expect to get one soon, so the web site may be going up as soon as this weekend.

The decision is creeping closer…

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“I will probably “test the waters” with ZendURL for a period and get out if I don’t like it. That’s if ZendURL doesn’t get a spate of negative reviews in the meantime.” -Me, a week ago.

Well, guess what happened. ZendURL got a spate of negative reviews. It’s like it came out of its overhaul worse than it came in.

So expect a web site to be established with FreeHostia in the near future. Unless big changes occur on the poll that I can’t ignore.

What makes a movie great?

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I recently watched On the Waterfront, to knock off a film from the list of films I haven’t seen, and help put me in the mood for the upcoming 100 Greatest Films list. When writing the entry for the film afterwards, I realized something. Having to look up the plot wasn’t my sole deficiency. In On the Waterfront‘s case, I could decipher the plot to some extent, but I didn’t really know what it was that made it so great. I realized that I was too little of a film buff to know what made certain films great, how they served as an influence on the medium.

Then I realized something else. Something worse. Some films did not influence people to come after them. Some films aren’t even useful to study for their art. They’re just considered great, entertaining films. Professional film critics would be hard-pressed to say what exactly makes them great; I would be woefully underqualified. And I certainly don’t know how to analyze the art of a film, even if I have watched it.

The AFI often brings in luminaries in film to comment on the films on its lists, and often all they say is how much they like the film, or particular parts of it. Several lists are accompanied by brief blurbs on the films, but they don’t do them justice. I want to take some time to explain the films and why they are so often considered among the greatest of all time, but I don’t know one lick about them. I’ll probably turn over many films’ entries to others (remember, I’m taking applications!) But that doesn’t make me look very good.

So, I’m turning this over to you. What is it that makes a film, and specificially the films so often mentioned among the greatest of all time, great? What should a layman like me who knows nothing except the films he’s seen recently know about the films he’s probably only heard of through the various greatest films’ lists but should know in greater detail? Feel free to leave a comment to this post.