BCS rankings – Week 8

(with apologies to u/horaff, who I shamelessly stole this post concept from)

From 1998 to 2013, the NCAA selected two teams to play in a single national championship game using the system of the Bowl Championship Series, better known as the BCS. Although constantly adjusted throughout their lifetime, the inputs most commonly used to create the rankings were:

The AP Top 25 (by percentage of possible points)

The USA Today coaches' poll (by percentage of possible points)

An average of six computer rankings; teams were given points for their placement in the rankings (25 points for #1, 24 points for #2, etc.), the highest and lowest scores were dropped, and the remaining four were added together to create a single computer score.

In later years the AP poll was replaced by the Harris Poll due to conflicts between the BCS and the AP, but since the Harris Poll no longer exists and it was pretty similar overall to the AP poll anyways, that is the poll used here.

Although some of the computer rankings have tweaked their formulas since they were used as part of the BCS, incorporating preseason rankings and taking into account strength of victory (both of which the BCS strongly discouraged), by and large the rankings remain the same almost a decade after the end of the BCS system. I think it's interesting to look at what the results would be if we still used these rankings today, so let's take a look.

Here are what the BCS rankings would be this week:

Dropouts: #20 NC State NC State

*note: one of the six computer polls, Anderson & Hester, did not publicly release rankings until this week. Therefore, last week's positions are based off a scaled equivalent using only five of the six computer rankings.