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Around SBN: Knicks Beat Lakers With Familiar Strategy

New blogpoll is out. Penn State ranked #12.

over 3 years ago Lioneye_edited_tiny BSD 9 comments 0 recs  | 

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East Carolina (10)?

you’ve got to be kidding me…I can’t stand any of the F’n Holtz’s….

by WETSU on Sep 10, 2008 1:57 PM EDT reply actions  

plus..

3 first place votes…. what a joke!!

by WETSU on Sep 10, 2008 1:58 PM EDT up reply actions  

Hell, I voted South Florida #1 for a week last year.

You can get all sorts of wacky stuff early in the season.

by Run Up The Score on Sep 10, 2008 3:28 PM EDT up reply actions  

At least ECU beat two D-1 schools, which is more than most programs can say at this point in the season. Add in the fact that one was on the road, and they might as well be #1.

by Tailgate Shogun on Sep 10, 2008 7:04 PM EDT up reply actions  

The resume rankers

I know. It’s the resume rankers. They claim to not take tradition into consideration in ranking an opponent. They strictly look at their resume, and with only two games played nobody has a more impressive resume than ECU who has knocked off Virginia Tech and West Virginia.

The problem is there is a certain hypocrisy in resume ranking. They claim to not take tradition and expectations into account in ranking a team. But they totally take tradition and expectations into account in evaluating a team’s opponents. What makes a win over Virginia Tech more impressive than a win over Akron? The answer is we all expect VT to get a lot of wins because they have a history of doing so.

I agree ECU should be ranked, but #1? C’mon. Does anyone really think they could beat USC, or Florida, or Georgia, or Oklahoma?

by BSD on Sep 10, 2008 2:11 PM EDT reply actions  

right

The ones voting them #1 will shuffle often from week to week, so where you normally have to wait for someone to falter to jump ahead of them, the people who have ECU #1, or even Top #10, won’t need a tough sell to drop them back down.

I really like resume voting but you have to be careful. There is the possibility that it has the exact same biases as a “traditional” ranking except the exact opposite like Mike is saying. The reason I prefer it is that they tend to be a lot more fluid, and so instead of having reports sticking to their guns and very resistant to shuffle similarly talented teams, you have voters that take an honest look at every team every week.

by KevinHD on Sep 10, 2008 2:21 PM EDT up reply actions  

Tradeoff between bias and error

It’s not necessarily a great idea to avoid human bias entirely in ranking. Hinton’s method, which is logically and intuitively attractive, obviously introduces personal opinion into the process. But resume ranking teams using opponents’ records from the previous year, or anything along those lines, could avoid human-introduced bias entirely — ranking reduces to a calculation — at the expense of a huge increase in error likelihood, because the metric used might suck (such as the one I mentioned).

Bias isn’t bad if it leads to smaller error, but resume ranking this way in the first part of the season is a waste of time. ECU deserves zero first place votes. For me, its attractiveness has always been that there at least exists a possibility of avoiding these late-season, hand-wavy, neutral-field arguments which are guesses and inevitable with power polling.

Far more offensive than all of this, though, is the underlying assumption in ranking that an ordering of teams actually exists, when evidence clearly suggests it does not. I wouldn’t be bothered by skipping the polling and just giving some random team Burger King crowns at the end of the year.

by gumbercules on Sep 10, 2008 3:39 PM EDT up reply actions  

What I don't like

I don’t like the trend with all the writers and voters that if your team loses you automatically drop in the polls no matter what the circumstances. In my mind, if you are the #20 team in the country and you play the #1 team on the road and lose on a last second field goal, you should move UP in the polls for such a valiant effort. But voters today just automatically drop you three or four spots as if they expected you to win that game or something. Then they drop the #1 team to #2 for letting the game be so close.

by BSD on Sep 10, 2008 2:27 PM EDT reply actions  

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