Anyone who knows me could tell you that I am a competitive person by nature. I also enjoy watching others compete. And one thing I love to watch is college football! Unfortunately, every year there are big disagreements between many people about the rankings of those teams, and which teams should be ranked higher than others. No real good answers have been put into effect, as the ongoing (and often heated) argument proves. Currently, college football teams are ranked weekly by 2 major polls, one voted in by members of the associated press, the other by college football coaches. But this presents problems.Ranking polls and thus all the systems that rely on them (the BCS rankings in part) are inherently flawed due to human nature, greed, a team's viewability, a team's history, and more. Coaches have absolutely no incentive to cast votes in the most accurate and uniform manner, and neither does the press for that matter.
A possible solution to rankings of teams uses one of these very weaknesses in the current system (greed) as the method of really deciding how well a team played each week. And thus, collectively, how it has performed throughout the season. How? Use people with "skin in the game" so to speak: bookmakers. Every week, bookmakers around the world put odds on NCAA football games. All the best odds makers in the world typically zero in on a certain spread, over/under, etc. If they're right, they make money, if they're wrong by much (cumulatively) they'll lose their shirt. So they have a vested interest in getting the spreads as close as possible to the correct result.
So how do we use this? No pre-season polls, first of all. All teams start equally ranked. Before each game, its official spread is locked in. If a team beats its spread (win or lose), it gets bonus ranking points. If it doesn't equal its spread, it loses bonus ranking points. The more it beats the spread by, the more bonus points it gets, and vice-versa. Rankings are then decided simply by team record, with the tiebreaker being how many bonus ranking points each team has. Thus, after week 1, roughly half the teams will be 1-0, and the other half will be 0-1. No 0-1 team will rank higher than any 1-0 team, and the top ranked team will be the 1-0 team with the largest number of bonus ranking points (ie the team that beat its spread last week by the most points). This will incentivize both teams to play hard for the entire 60 minutes of the game.Of course, you may say, "Wait, would this kind of system entice strong teams to schedule a bunch of pansies, and also penalize teams in supposedly "strong" conferences?" A valid concern indeed. And one that can easily be addressed with one additional numerical modifier. It could be called a "strength of schedule" modifier, much like the one which has been used in the BCS system. For example, the combined winning percentage of all your opponents could constitute the modifier. We just need to get people to sit down and work out the math, and try to take into account all variables.
Sure it has its potential problems, but it is a start. And breaking the status quo is the only way that many great teams and players out there will ever be able to compete (in the rankings) on a level playing field.
