re: MSU... Top 50 football program or not..

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So we should judge a program's historical or recent success based solely on the SOS as assessed by a computer/or computers, and to hell with whether you won the games or not?

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You clearly have a pretty good understanding of how the computer rankings work.

Yep, they just use SOS as determined by a computer as 1/3 of the BCS formula. Why we all aren't just playing 12 tough games is beyond me, since it would guarantee us a 33% chance of being in the BCS title game.

Allow me to explain how this works... The computer formulas attempt to determine how good a team ACTUALLY is in regards to ranking. They do this via complex mathematical evaluations of wins and losses vs SOS. Anotherwords, they operate on the assumption that a 6-6 SEC team may not truly be worse than a 8-4 Mountain West team. If these two teams don't play, how do you know which is better? That's what the formulas are there to decide.

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So...since I'm mental, please tell me how much weight should be placed on SOS as opposed to actually winning the games.

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You ask us to determine this for you, but that's essentially what I already did by pointing you to the computer rankings. There are 6 easily available rankings that are used to determine the BCS national championship. Each one carries a weight of 5.5% in the BCS formula(the equivalent of 11 voters in each poll). No possible way WE could come up with any better formula than these nationally renowned mathematicians/statisticians.

Sagarin says we were the 31st best team in the country last year, against the #28 SOS. That's probably pretty close to accurate...