We are enhancing the fan experience in college football.
There are two main polls that release rankings each week: The AP Poll and the College Football Selection Committee (CFBSC). The AP Poll gets released each week, and the CFBSC release their rankings weekly starting with week 10. When you see a promo for a college football game, you are seeing the AP’s ranking on the screen, or you are seeing the CFBSC poll once they become released. Each poll only releases their top 25 teams, so it becomes a big question mark for schools 26-130.
College athletics are the ONLY major American (and maybe in the world?) sports association where a panel of people determine the outcome of who competes in the playoffs. NFL, NBA, and MLB all have calculable playoff outcomes. The teams with the best records make the playoffs, and if there needs to be a tie-breaker, so be it. Going into the final games of the year, each team approximately knows how well they need to do in order to be allowed into the postseason.
College football is playing pin the donkey with the lights off. The panels decide who is ranked based on their eyes, which makes any mathematician’s hair stand up straight. Florida State went 13-0 and won their conference championship, but were kept out of the final four teams. All the power lies with these people, the schools are dependent on them for playoff contention, but nobody actually knows what is important for determining the best teams!
Rankings are also relevant for fans as well. Fans want to know why and how the rankings come about, but nobody has come up with a way to mathematically assign value to these rankings. Since that hasn’t existed, everyone has to go along with waiting for the rankings to be released, rather than understand what will happen as the games unfold.
As someone with a background in statistics and machine learning, I have an interest in problems that can be solved with data. As human beings, we all have a craving for knowing things before everyone else. In today’s world, it is almost expected everything will be in real time. It is time for rankings to follow the same trend. Chess, poker, business, and sports are all about whats coming next. But we don’t want to wait for whats happening next, we want it now.
After years of playing around with data, I’ve built machine learning models that accurately predicts outcomes of rankings each week of the season.
Rankings Right Now
Rankings Right Now is a new website running on machine learning models predicting college football rankings, in real time. Currently, we only know what the AP Poll or the College Football Selection Committee ranked teams after all the games have been played. But what if we got to ask each poll how they would rank at any given point in time? This is when we can turn to Rankings Right Now.
As the games change and scores are updated, so will our predicted rankings. We will be able to see the full change in rankings over the timeline of the day. It’s entertaining, it’s informative, and most importantly, it allows for fans to gain insights into a spectrum of possibilities. Rankings Right Now was built with the fans in mind.
This isn’t power rankings. This isn’t our own rankings for who we think is the best. This algorithm is based on the only rankings that matter and that fans care about.
Creating a Login
Everyone can create a login for free! There are some perks to creating a login:
Pick your favorite teams to track them better
Have access to the What If simulation to change reality
Have early access to the College Rank ‘Em challenge
More on all of these as we get ready for the season.
What This Newsletter Will Bring
Each week will be a hyper-focus on college football rankings. There will be an initial newsletter before the games start giving information about the expected rankings if everything goes as anticipated (it never does), and what running simulations of different outcomes can tell us of the possible ranking expectations.
Once the games are over, we can give out our final prediction of what we believe the rankings will be when they are announced in the polls. We will also show fun graphics of how the rankings changed over time during the day, and go over any close calls and what the rankings would have looked like if it had gone another way.
I am thrilled to dive into this season and hopefully provide college football fans a new perspective when it comes to one of the most interesting aspects of sports.
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