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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/guyinthenorthoftexas on 2023-09-13 00:38:22.
I think we can all agree that one of the best parts of college football is its subjectivity. With so few games played and so many teams we don’t get the opportunity for every team to play each other. So to decide who is the best we have to rank them.
Traditionally, this has been done by asking 60ish media members (or coaches) their top 25. The aggregator then takes those rankings and assigns 25 points to each voters 1st place team, 24 to their 2nd place team, and so on all the way to the 25th team which gets just one point. The aggregator then sums up each teams point total and then ranks them based on the point total. This way have been a good method for a time before computers when the telegram was an acceptable form of communication, but we have advanced so much. To give an example, with this weighing system being number 24 is twice as good as number 25, while being number 2 is 96% of being number 1. Surely we can do better now in the 21st century when everyone has a computer in their pocket and no one uses telegrams.
That’s when I got curious about possible reranking the AP poll using a ranked choice system. The data is perfect for it, voters have provided an ordered list of who they believe to be the best football teams. For those unaware of how ranked choice voting works, it starts off as a normal first pass the post vote, however if no team reaches a majority of votes, I don’t say the team with the most votes currently wins, instead I drop the team(s) with the fewest votes and then try again. I then check again, and repeat until I have a team with a majority of voters approval. Since I then want a top 25 poll, I do this 24 more times just with the added step of first removing the teams already ranked.
So how does this work in practice. Taking this weeks poll as an example you can probably already guess that Georgia is ranked number 1 with this method as well, receiving 55 out of 62 first place votes. The next 3 teams, Michigan, Florida State, and Texas all receive a majority of votes in their place as well. However, things get interesting ranking number 5. There is no team with a majority of votes: Ohio State received 28, USC 25, Penn State 5, Washington 3, Alabama 2, and Notre Dame 1. Since Notre Dame, Alabama, Washington, and Penn State cannot reach a majority while Ohio State and USC remain I can eliminate them and try again. In the two horse race it turns out to be a tie. Why do you have an even number of voters AP? As I go further down the list there is less consensus on the best teams so it starts taking more iterations to find the next ranked team. Once I repeated 25 times I end up with the following ranking:
| Rank | Traditional | Ranked Choice |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Georgia | Georgia |
| 2 | Michigan | Michigan |
| 3 | Florida State | Florida State |
| 4 | Texas | Texas |
| 5 | USC | Ohio State & USC |
| 6 | Ohio State | |
| 7 | Penn State | Penn State |
| 8 | Washington | Washington |
| 9 | Notre Dame | Notre Dame |
| 10 | Alabama | Alabama |
| 11 | Tennessee | Tennessee |
| 12 | Utah | Utah |
| 13 | Oregon | Oregon |
| 14 | LSU | LSU |
| 15 | Kansas State | Kansas State |
| 16 | Oregon State | Oregon State |
| 17 | Ole Miss | Ole Miss |
| 18 | Colorado | Colorado |
| 19 | Oklahoma | North Carolina & Oklahoma |
| 20 | North Carolina | |
| 21 | Duke | Duke |
| 22 | Miami (FL) | Miami (FL) |
| 23 | Washington State | Washington State |
| 24 | UCLA | UCLA |
| 25 | Iowa | Iowa |
What’s that except for the ties it is exactly the same? The complicated method just provided less information than before and took longer to calculate. I guess the original system is not so bad. Feel free to ignore this post because I have wasted both your time and mine.