Indy, I'll just agree to disagree with you about the sOS stuff. Last year the SOS rankings had a bunch of Pac 10 teams in the the upper 20 or so teams because their is no way for the computers to formulate how good your opponents really are when it comes down to it. and the PAC 10 teams playing a bunch of Podunk U teams on the road is a big reason for that. And a teams conference schedule evens out way too much after factoring in your opponents opponents, as all of the teams win half the games and lose half, it actually hurts a very good team as their wins against the other conference teams makes the rest of the conference appear worse. To me Auburn beating UT twice as well as LSU and UGA should have been weighted much more and the quality win component should not have been taken out, should be for beating other top 25 teams in the final BCS ranking and should not be limited to beating them once. And the amount that the computers rank road wins is stupid, especially Sagarin's, which gives more credit to beating a great team at home than it does a crummy team on the road. And I do believe the voters put a lot of stock into Auburn's weak OOC schedule last year and especially the fact they played a D-1AA team, I read too many articles to think otherwise.
A difference in Auburn's OOC last year and ours this year is that there's really APPEARS weak when voters look at it. La Tech, The Citadel, and UL-Monroe look a whole lot weaker than Appl. State, North Texas (perennial New Orleans Bowl team) and Arizona State (Top 20 team).
First, I'm not sure what we're agreeing to disagree on since some of what I wrote was fact and most of the rest well-informed opinion, but that's okay. You've covered a lot of material in this post. I'll respond with some random comments on a few of the topics. Quality Wins: The old QW was a well-intentioned adjustment, but it was an abomination. There just isn't a good way to make this kind of adjustment equitable and reasonable. Since it doesn't exist anymore, I won't go into all the ways it's screwed up, but I'm sure there are a number of don't know their ass from a hole in the ground types who think this is the reason AU got screwed. To address that nonsense let's look at it. Using the 2003 formula AU had the following QWs in 2004: GA, that's it. Their score would have been adjusted down by 0.4 under the old system. Ok would have had a -0.7 adjustment for beating TX and USC would have had a -0.9 adjustment for beating Cal and VT. I'll be...AU falls further behind... AU got quite a boost from playing TN twice in their SOS. Every game counts in that calculation. In 2003, it was that boost that put us in the CG over USC. AU just didn't get a big enough boost to overcome OK, who also played a championship game, or USC, who got a 12th game by playing VT in the Kickoff Classic. SOS and Computer Models: The context of the thread is really teams that are BCS CG quality, not Indy Bowl candidates. We're talking about undefeated teams and teams with no more than 1 loss. With undefeated teams since margin of victory is not allowed, SOS is really the only thing left that you can sort teams on. If you beat everyone, regardless of location, it's pretty hard for other factors to matter much. They start coming into play as the losses mount (i.e. who did they lose to and where; who did they beat and where). But good teams with only a loss will more than likely have similar losses, so as long as there is reasonable spread in the SOS, the computers will most likely sort them out the same way. Again, I'm speaking in terms of the aggregate avg ranking (which is what counts) and not the specific ranking in the models. I'm not arguing that the old BCS SOS is the right definition of SOS, but it does correlate very well with the models. All I'm saying is that this is the way things are. My wanting to do something different is not going to change that fact.
