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What is a Moon Poll, exactly? A moon poll is a goon-created computer ranking of college football teams. In past years, my understanding is that they usually limited their focus to teams in FBS, but there's enough data for at least some systems to be able to rate pretty much every college with a varsity football team (except that one New England conference in DIII that doesn't play OOC games). I'll warn you that if you do this you're likely to see undefeated teams from lower divisions sneaking into the overall top 40, though. Being computer rankings, they're usually all over the map in a hilarious fashion for much of the season but will settle on something close to a consensus near the end. Incidentally, I have no idea who coined "moon poll" but I love the phrasing. Last year's thread is here and I don't think it's sunk into the archives yet. How do I make a Moon Poll? You're almost certainly going to need an algorithm of some sort. You can program it yourself, or work out something in Excel (a number of people in last year's thread seemed to be doing this, myself included). As for your criteria, you can really pick anything you like. More conventional systems tend to rely on who beat who and by how many points, but as an example wa27's rather unique poll uses VegasInsider data. David Wilson has a pretty substantial listing of a bunch of existing systems; most of them keep their formulas secret but some of them clearly explain the math behind what they're doing, if you want something to work from and can follow it. Once you get something going, post your rankings in this thread each week! Where do I get data? The NCAA has a page you can get .csv files from. Look for "Schedules and Results". This page, maintained by Peter Wolfe (whose rankings the BCS uses), will be updated throughout the season with a list of game results. Wolfe includes every division which is nice provided you want to rate every division. I know there are other places to get this stuff from but it's been a while since I've looked into this kind of thing so I can't remember what they are. Again, please let me know if you've got any sources to add -- the two links I have now only have win-loss and points data, which isn't very helpful if you want to base your rankings on yardage or turnover margin or cumulative number of fans played in front of per official attendance numbers or something. Anything else? I'll be doing weekly compilations of rankings throughout the season, like I did last year. These come complete with deviation measures, BCS comparisons, a Bottom Ten just for fun, and of course big tables with tiny football helmets in them. It's worth noting, however, that for mathematical reasons a lot of systems rely on all of the teams you want to rank being "connected" to one another and consequently don't even produce results for the first couple of weeks. Basil Hayden fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Aug 20, 2013 |
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Aug 20, 2013 20:19
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:07 |
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Basil Hayden posted:I'll be doing weekly compilations of rankings throughout the season, like I did last year. These come complete with deviation measures, BCS comparisons, a Bottom Ten just for fun, and of course big tables with tiny football helmets in them. Yeah so obviously I haven't been doing this. I seem to have a lot less time on my hands than I did last year, so I don't even have my ratings working yet.  I will try to fix both of these problems for the coming week.
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Sep 29, 2013 16:01
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wa27 posted:Every week I keep thinking I'll finally get motivated and run my poll, and every week I don't bother. I know that feeling. At least you didn't start the thread promising to do summary posts, then discover you'd broken your poll and just can't be assed to fix it.  Maybe I'll make it up by going on a retrorating kick in the offseason, I don't know.
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Nov 11, 2013 21:36
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