First, here is the Top 40 Graph for the teams as they existed just before the bowl season. Sorry it’s not very legible, I ran into a width restriction, but you can basically make the names out.

Remember that the teams that are off by themselves are only by themselves because they don’t have beatwins to anyone in the Top 40. I ran it a few times just to be sure, but no matter what, I always seemed to get UCLA ranked #3. Their loss to Arizona made them lose credit for several beatwins, but they still had enough high quality wins to make them competitive with the other top teams. Their loss to USC only served to make sure they were ranked below USC. The top ten before bowl season:

1. USC (Score: 377)
2. Texas (Score: 375)
3. UCLA (Score: 344)
4. Ohio St
5. Texas Tech
6. Oklahoma
7. Oregon
8. Virginia Tech
9. Wisconsin
10. West Virginia

And here’s the updated Top 40 graph after all the bowls:

The top twenty teams after bowl season:

1. Texas
2. Wisconsin
3. USC
4. UCLA
5. Oklahoma
6. Auburn
7. Alabama
8. Ohio St
9. Virginia
10. Oregon
11. Minnesota
12. Texas Tech
13. Virginia Tech
14. West Virginia
15. Nebraska
16. TCU
17. LSU
18. Tulsa
19. Penn St
20. Arizona St

The previous week’s rankings guessed right on the following:

• Penn St => Florida St
• Virginia Tech => Louisville
• Ohio St => Notre Dame
• West Virginia => Georgia (press rankings had this wrong)
• Wisconsin => Auburn (press rankings had this wrong)
• NC State => S Florida
• UCLA => Northwestern
• LSU => Miami (press rankings had this wrong)
• Oklahoma => Oregon (press rankings had this wrong, Oklahoma was unranked!)
• Nebraska => Michigan (press rankings had this wrong)
• Boston College => Boise St
• Clemson => Colorado
• Arizona St => Rutgers
• Kansas => Houston
• Navy => Colorado St
• California => Brigham Young
• Southern Miss => Arkansas St

and guessed wrong on:

• Texas => USC
• Alabama => Texas Tech (press rankings had this right)
• Florida => Iowa (press rankings had this right)
• Tulsa => Fresno St
• TCU => Iowa St (press rankings had this right)
• Virginia => Minnesota
• Missouri => South Carolina
• Utah => Georgia Tech
• Memphis => Akron
• Nevada => UCF
• Toledo => Texas-El Paso

My powerbook crapped out creating the power rankings, but I might try again and update this entry later with the extra detail.

Again, the teams that are floating by themselves are the ones that have no beatpaths to anyone else in the Top Forty. They all have plenty of beatpaths to the other Division 1-A teams. Since this is only a partial graph, a top row team isn’t necessarily better than teams in lower rows. The Beatpaths power rankings still have USC and Texas at the top.

Read on for the power rankings for the Top 25 teams, along with where they were ranked last week under this algorithm, and where the BCS has them now:

The system analyzes all 700+ college football teams and generates a beatpath graph of everyone (which is so laughably large that no one will ever see it). Then I cull all the teams that aren’t Division 1-A, but keep their beatpaths – meaning, if Miami beats Podunk Tech beats Georgia, Miami will still keep its beatpath to Georgia. Then I calculate the Top 40 Teams using the same method to get power rankings. Then I cull out all the teams that aren’t in the Top 40 and generate the graph that you see here.

They’re colored by conference (I chose random colors, suggestions of better color combos appreciated). Also, the arrows are only for relationships within the Top 40. For instance, Virginia and Michigan don’t have beatwins or beatlosses to anyone in the Top 40, but they do with other teams. Because of this, the length of the beatpaths aren’t really indicative of how good a team is… I mean, it sort of is, but not really. It’s indicative of something.

Again, grain of salt – for now, I’m using NCAA to try out some new algorithm variants. This one is based on beatpower, but it attempts to drag teams a bit closer to the average strength of the teams in their beatloops. Last week UTEP was unnaturally high – this sort of thing will penalize teams more if they’re in a loop with crappy teams – or reward them if they’re in a loop with teams better than their own rating.

Notre Dame(9) at 32. Michigan(15) at 27. Florida(22) at 29. South Carolina(23) at 38. Boston College(24) at 37.

Last place: New Mexico State.

Here’s the Beatpaths NCAA Top 25, from games through 11/5/05. You should totally take these with a grain of salt, because I’m not even sure I parsed the game data correctly, and I haven’t seriously looked at the algorithm to see if I missed anything obvious.

Other BCS teams: We have Michigan (21) at 26, Minnesota (24) at 27, Georgia Tech (23) at 30, and Auburn (20) all the way down at 36.

Who’s last at 118th? Rice.

Technorati Tags: beatpath, football, power rankings

You have fun with that.

Yeah, I know you can’t see a thing. It’s pretty damn funny in my opinion. Rest assured that USC and other teams you’d expect are near the top of the graph.

The funniest part about it, though, is that there’s that tiny collection of teams that is completely separate from the rest of the graph, the top team of which has no beatlosses. That team (which I guess should be in the running for the National Championship!) is Trinity CT. All of the other teams are snarled together, though.

The system also calculated a full ranking, but it’s pretty silly. There are a lot of teams that have no beatlosses with a maximum beatpower score of 100.0 so you’ve got Wisconsin Whitewater up in the top rankings with USC and Texas. But, I’ll be able to re-run this all with Division 1-A teams only, ignoring any matchups outside of the division, and see how that looks.

However, if you look at all the 100.0 teams and sort by how many beatwins they actually have, then it looks like the top four are Florida St, Texas, USC, and Alabama. Yes, Florida St. looks odd – but they have a beatpath to Miami, who hasn’t beatlooped them, and have developed alternate valid beatpaths to the other teams they’ve lost to.

The worst team of the 712? Tri-State IN, with 281 beatlosses.

I’m sure this will look different once I run it with Division 1-A teams only.

Technorati Tags: beatpath, football