Math professors Harris, Hutson crunch the college football numbers

Are the BCS computer ratings the best way to rank college football teams? Peter Keating, a writer with ESPN the Magazine, doesn’t think so, and he enlisted the help of Furman math professors John Harris and Kevin Hutson to prove his point.

Keating writes about ranking teams according to the Simple Rating System (SRS), which looks at the final scores among a set of teams, then rates the teams by their margin of victory in those games, adjusted upward or downward by their opponents’ strength.  Furman professors Harris and Hutson helped Keating solve the matrix algebra equations necessary to get SRS ratings for every Division I-A football team since 2006.

The Dec. 28 article, which predicted this year’s BCS bowl game winners based on the SRS rankings, appeared online in ESPN Insider.

Read “A true rating of BCS teams” (subscription required)