re: SIAP UCF to hang a national championship banner in their stadium

quote:

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I don't know how his rankings work, but I notice that his current rankings do not take into account the playoff and bowl games thus far.

If Alabama wins, his rankings will have to account for wins over his current #2 and #3 teams. If UGA wins, it will have to account for wins over his current #4 and #6 teams.

Something tells me that those wins would carry more weight than one win over his current #9 team.

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Yeah, I'm not sure if UCF will remain in the #1 position if Alabama can beat Georgia. I think if Georgia beats Alabama, then that'll give them enough points to overtake UCF. I just think it's funny that for all of the laughing being done at UCF, that they could potentially have a legitimate claim for a National Championship, as recognized under NCAA rules.

Reading about Peter Wolfe's rankings, he says the following:

The method we use is called a maximum likelihood estimate. In it, each team i is assigned a rating value pi that is used in predicting the expected result between it and its opponent j, with the likelihood of i beating j given by:

pi / (pi + pj)

The probability P of all the results happening as they actually did is simply the product of multiplying together all the individual probabilities derived from each game. The rating values are chosen in such a way that the number P is as large as possible. This is often called a Bradley-Terry model, and is described in papers listed at Wilson's site (see Bradley and Terry 1952, Ford 1957, Elo 1986, Keener 1993).