Debunking College Football 'Wisdom'

Put yourself in the shoes of a head coach of a top athletic program and answer the following questions:

In order to impress the voters of the Associated Press Top 25 poll and show them what a dominant team you've built, is it better to

1) win against strong teams rather than weak ones?
2) win in blowouts rather than nail biters?
3) lose early in the season rather than late? (top teams do lose -- the #1 team has had one loss three times since 1995, and even the most prestigious bowl games -- which offer big payouts for the colleges involved -- often feature teams with at least one loss.)

If you answered yes to all, or any, of these you might be in need of a reality check from Trevon D. Logan, an economist at college football powerhouse Ohio State.

Logan argues that the above three claims are part of the received wisdom of college football, and that -- more importantly -- they're just wrong.

As with most pieces of conventional wisdom, the bases for these assertions are anecdotal, "everybody knows" stories. Implicit in these assertions, however, are empirical claims that can and should be tested.

And Logan does just that, using week-by-week AP poll results over a 25 year period for the most dominant college football teams and the opponents they faced.

Each one of 65 AP voters -- sportswriters and broadcasters from around the country -- compile their own top 25 ranking every week. The number one team is assigned 25 points, the number two team 24 points and so on. The rankings are then tallied across all voters to come up with the weekly poll.

Investigating how these point totals changed after each victory and defeat for the teams in his study, Logan finds that blowouts do matter, but not in the expected way. A team loses 20 percent more points if it loses big, but AP voters don't seem to give any extra points to winners of blowouts. Close wins are also unrewarded, but close losses reduce the change in points by 10 percent.

Winning late in the season (after the 10th week) has no effect on the change in points, but losing close to bowl time is actually better than losing earlier in the season -- the point drop from losing late in the season is 20 percent less.

Logan's findings imply that 75 percent of AP voters rank a team one place higher for a late season loss than for an early season demise.

In fact, if one were to lose in a blowout at the end of the season, the net result would not be that different from losing by a small margin early in the season.

As for opponent strength, Logan found that beating a strong opponent didn't add any extra juice to a team's point total. Losing to a strong team, however, hurt the weekly point total less than a typical loss.

If you live and breath college football, I'd highly recommend reading Logan's paper where he also has an in depth discussion of how college football came to be the monetary powerhouse that it is. It's rare to see academic writing this readable.

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