2008 Changes: Hello, Massey Combined!

In a quest to make the BAW rankings better, there are two major changes to the methodology this year. The first one is less reliance upon the sagarin rankings by using the massey combined rankings. The reason for this change is two-fold.

First, using sagarin exclusively often meant that the BAW rankings reflected pretty much the sagarin rankings. While there was some new information added, it was not nearly enough IMO. Most people could just learn everything they needed from sagarin. The BAW was not adding enough new information to make it worth it for enough people to check it out.

Second, and most importantly, the massey combined is a much more robust ranking measure. Massey combined relies on the logic of The Wisdom of Crowds. While sagarin could very well be the most expert of all systems, its system will still be inferior to a weighted combination of all systems out there in theory backed up scientific studies. Massey combined takes all the numerous ways that people have devised for ranking college football teams and combines them into one consensus rating. The details are on Massey's site. They make sense to me. This should really help things.

This will be the new way of ranking teams 1 through 120. The Massey Combined will give the ordinal rankings used in the methodology. However, this says nothing about the cardinal value of those rankings. We need to have a good estimate at the point value of being, say, #17 v #77. For that power index point ranking, we will again be using the 120 sagarin predictor scores for FBS. I have contemplated doing a weighted average of sagarin predictor, teamrankings, and some proprietary indexes I have developed on my own. For right now, I'm not doing that, but I reserve the right to do it if sagarin predictor starts looking quite different in its distribution. So, sagarin predictor is still a big factor in the cardinal, power index values for team. Now, sagarin predictor will be a very minor factor with massey combined being the major factor in the ordinal ranking of FBS teams 1 to 120.