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Did College Football Get It Right in 2003 and 2004?

CSEF · 2006 Mathematics & Software

Alex A. Giannetta · St. Anthony's School, Fresno

Overview

Objectives/Goals My goal was to determine whether the formula used by the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), college football ranking system, placed the most qualified teams in the National Championship game in 2003 and 2004. Methods/Materials I constructed a spreadsheet that included the following information for all 117 Division 1A College Football teams: Winning Percentage, Strength of Schedule, Points per game, Yards per game, and Yards Against per game. Based on this information, I created my own formula which was (Winning Percentage + Strength of Schedule) X (Points per game+ Yards per Game # Yards Against Per Game). After applying the formula to each team, I received a numerical value that I placed in order from highest to lowest. This provided the rankings I used to find which team I believe should have played in the championship games. Results The experimentation ended with the Oklahoma and USC in the National Championship game, just like the BCS rankings said. Conclusions/Discussion My conclusion is that the BCS, which ranks the teams, is not always 100 % correct, however the teams who played in the National Championship games were the same for both my ranking system and the BCS system. My results somewhat supported my hypothesis.

Summary statement

My project is to determine if the ranking system used by college football ensures that the top two teams played in the championship game in 2003 and 2004.

Help received

My parents assisted me in designing my board, as well as helping me to locate some of the statistics used. My science teacher worked with me on expanding my project to include the 2003 championship for a second year of comparison.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2006 Mathematics & Software · Entry J1214

Resources

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Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

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