What we can learn from the BCS

Growing weary of winter expansion talk, I let this be my final thoughts on the whole expansion debate.

Grumblings of the ridiculousness of 2-3 hour drives for games seemed to be prominent. Travel is a concern and weekday games are nice when it comes to tradition and planning out your summers.

One idea I pondered in the dead of winter 2011 was to learn what an organization did to mathematically calculate the differences between small conferences and leagues during a relatively short season and playoffs. Who am I talking about?

NCAA Football. The BCS. The Bowl Championship Series.

With expansion unlikely. What about a province-wide or North Central wide ranking system purely based on mathematics, using strength of schedule, home-away, tournament and exhibition games and playoffs to come up with a final ranking at the end of the season.

Leagues would be encouraged to post teams’ non-conference games and submit scores to someone to tabulate standings and percentages overall. I’m a geek so I could nominate myself.

The goal being to promote more non-conference games, whether it’s tournaments or exhibition games, and to see comparisons between teams. It could even create the hunger to play similarly-ranked teams for bragging rights at the end of the year.

The formula would take into account beyond wins and losses:

• Strength of schedule
• Tournament, league or exhibition game
• Location of game (Home/Away/Neutral)
• Class of opponent (AAA/AA/A)
• Score (Not pure runs for or against, but levels for shutouts and >10 runs, etc…

At the end of the season a ranking could be done. Those that may want to participate could play off in a bowl-like format or the top teams could get invites to provincials at a reduced rate.

Crazy idea? Probably. But once the formula is figured out, it’d be fun to track for us data geeks.