Pre-Season College Football Hype Does Actually Matter

For all the criticism of the BCS, there are more than a few things they do right.

One is that they refrain from ranking football teams until well into the season. BCS rankings come out on October 19th this season. Two more weeks of overrated teams exposing themselves and we'll have a pretty good grasp of this year’s college football reality.

Let me tell you what wasn't reality....ranking Tennessee....or West Virginia....or Arizona State.

That being said, the completely unbiased opinion of BCS computer algorithms only comprises 1/3 of the ingredients required to make BCS soup, the other two thirds is human opinion. 

As I illustrated above with a #18 pre-season Tennessee team, human opinion is, almost by definition, flawed.

Business Marketing school teaches that customer perception is, in fact, reality as it relates to a product or service. It also only takes hearing a false statement 18 times from a reputable source in order to make it be perceived as true.

I just made that up. I didn't go to marketing school.

Read it seventeen more times though and you'll probably quote it in your next debate.

Unless you don't find me to be a credible source. I did just lie to you in order to support my opinion.

Back to the point.

ESPN has recently published a mock BCS ranking based on the two polls and five of the six computer models used by the BCS.

Some examples of differences that occur between this projection and current AP rankings are that Vanderbilt is at #8 and Utah is ranked #9.

Question:

What do Vanderbilt and Utah have in common that is exclusive of the other top 10 teams?

Answer:

They both suffer from low pre-season expectations from human prognosticators because of relatively stinky 2007 seasons.

Of course a computer doesn't remember last season or have a sense of smell.

Sure those undefeated records may not last long, but let's give them their 15 minutes of fame. Winning all your football games is getting harder every year.

This raises another question:

Are rankings supposed to be a current evaluation of which teams have played well up to this point in the schedule, or a predictor of how they will likely finish the season?

In my opinion, the latter should never be considered when ranking teams.

In order to be ranked highly, ever, you need a large amount of pre-season hype.

For example, the USC Trojans have lost one game to Oregon State, a very marginal team, and are ranked #8. The expectation is that they will finish the season as one of the top 5 teams.

If USC had started the season un-ranked, the Ohio State win might have bumped them up to a top 20ish ranking and then an Oregon State “see, I told you so” loss would have made them quickly disappear.

TCU has lost one game to #1 ranked Oklahoma, not really a "see, I told you so" loss, and won 5 other games, to admittedly poor teams, where the outcome was never in doubt, but is currently completely out of the top 25.

The expectation is that they will likely lose to other good in-conference foes. TCU's problem is that they belong to that pesky MWC conference. There could never be three decent Mountain West teams, could there?

For those of you who don’t care about MWC teams getting reamed by the media, which is probably everyone, I have another example of expectations being considered more important than reality by pollsters.

Alabama is #1 in almost all the currently ignored computer rankings. What was the pre-season impression we all had of Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide? It was negative. Maybe we needed to be told what a great coach and upstanding, honest man Nick Saban is 18 times.

I know it is no fun for fans when the art of expert opinion turns into the science of statistical reasoning, but I am eagerly anticipating the BCS poll coming out. So until rankings are totally comprised of completely unbiased data, under appreciated schools really need to work on their marketing and public relations.

I envision a day when the Head Athletics Marketing position at a university pays as much Head Football Coach.