Barking Carnival

As everyone should know by now, I am a computer ratings geek. I have my own set of ratings, but I recently decided to set out to design a computer ratings system that accommodates the factors that either must or in my opinion should be reflected in a system used by the BCS. With […]

Based on the power ratings available here
Scores rounded to nearest whole numbers and/or common football scores

The ratings predictions went 51-17 this week making them 367-83 overall after three weeks. Games with predicted spreads of 28+ are 62-2, spreads of 14-28 are 151-16, spreads of 7-14 are 76-20, and spreads under 7 are 78-45.
Class 5A
Division I

Regional […]

I’ll cut right to the chase. I now believe that my previous analysis of the computers was too rosy. While I stated that Tech as the wedge in Wolfe’s system was only possible and not certain, it now looks like there’s no way it will hold. Tech currently has a score of […]

Based on the power ratings available here
Scores rounded to nearest whole numbers and/or common football scores

The ratings predictions went 111-25 this week making them 316-66 overall after two weeks. Games with predicted spreads of 28+ are 57-2, spreads of 14-28 are 129-14, spreads of 7-14 are 66-19, and spreads under 7 are 64-31. Obviously the […]

By overwhelming popular demand, we at Barking Carnival will publish a basic BCS primer. This primer is not as interested in the question of why the BCS exists in the first place, simply with explaining the mechanics of the standings and selection rules.
Components
There are three components to the BCS standings. The first is […]

Based on the power ratings available here
Scores rounded to nearest whole numbers and/or common football scores

The ratings went 205-41 last week (including the regular season games postponed by Hurricane Ike in lower classification districts with a BYE through the first round). Games with a predicted margin of 28+ were 44-2, 14-28 point margins were […]

It’s important to note that the best part about the current Texas high school football playoff setup is that because the UIL now sends four teams from each district to the playoffs, Austin High (Loyal Forever, bitches) has a decent chance of actually going from time to time.
So in honor of the playoffs, here are […]

Ratings
I missed last week’s update, but the links are below for this week. The only good news about getting seriously ill before the Tech game is that I don’t have much recollection of what happened during the game. So that’s nice.
All Teams Ratings
D-1A Only Ratings
Ratings Odds and Ends
A few things to note about […]

“due to violation of team rules.”
Houston Chronicle blurb here
Reality is apparently that the violation of team rules involves posting something on his Facebook page that wasn’t very nice to Barack Obama. To say the least. But there are NO POLITICAL POSTS ON BARKING CARNIVAL, right?

I was hurrying back to my apartment after having walked out of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam (precursor required to take the Professional Engineer exam after a certain time period in the workforce) early to watch the Longhorns game in Lincoln, Nebraska. Some engineering classmates called me after they got out to give me […]

The Ratings
Well, they’re definitely new and when you start out really low then you’re probably going to improve. So I’ve got that going for me.

Which is nice.
The previous version of the ratings had a couple of issues that bothered me. The first was that the composite ratings would occasionally have a team ranked […]

A losing record in the third week and a review of Sagarin’s predicted lines and retrodictive accuracy caused me to revisit my predicted margin formula. So below are the season results so far followed by this week’s predictions using the new formula. What I noticed was that I was more accurate on games […]

Ratings Update
As always, both the All Teams and the Division I-A only ratings have been updated. And Texas’ rating continues to get more and more absurd with the potential to get even more out of hand. In both sets of ratings, Texas has defeated the #2 and #5 teams in consecutive weeks. […]

The second week of the ratings vs. point spreads for this season was a wash. The ratings went 25-25-0 against the spread. Season to date:

Confidence
Record

Overall
58-42-2

14+
7-2-0

10+
5-7-1

7+
11-10-0

I ran the numbers to see what the BCS standings would look like if released today. Peter Wolfe is the lone holdout on his ratings this year, so I went with the five computers that have published their ratings.
Link to image file
As you can see, we have the hardest schedule of all the real […]

Maybe even live up to their preseason ranking at some point.
Bowden fired

Ratings Update
Even though it was expected that Texas would move up to #1 in both the All Teams ratings as well as the Division 1-A Teams only ratings, I had no idea how ridiculous the rating value for Texas would be. Equally amazing is the all Big 12 South top 3 and 5 of […]

Coaches’ Poll
AP Poll link forthcoming, but supposedly we’re #1 there, too. Next week’s home game against Missouri will be the first time the Texas Longhorns play a game as the #1 team in either major poll since the 1984 game against OU.

I lucked into some tickets at face late on Friday. So I told the old lady to start packing because we were going to Texas/OU for the 4th time. No hesitation whatsoever from her. Of course, I knew there wouldn’t be. Why?
My wife cares about only one football game all year. […]

Last year I began to track my ratings’ performance against the point spread for all games. (I use the ratings set that includes all teams instead of the Division I-A only ratings because more data is always better when evaluating true team strength.) This is where I should be launching into an infomercial about […]