Big 10 defeats Big LEast

[deliverance]

That proves once again why Jeff Sagarin should not be allowed to have any say in the BCS. Pitt ranked third? Are you serious? They have to be 5th or lower. They weren't in the Final Four. Please tell me he at least had Villanova ahead of them. 'Nova beat them twice and one of those times was by 10 points.

[El-Moldo]

To be honest with you, Uconn was ranked ahead of Pitt at second, and Pitt beat them twice. And what's being in the Final 4 have to do with where you end up in the final season rankings?

[The Ancient Enemy]

I shake my head time and again at how smart you are, Moldo, and how you constantly look at Jeff Sagarin's INSANE and RETARDED ranking system as the end-all of all of this!

[deliverance]

What does the Final Four have to do with it? Are you serious? I hope you're joking. The best teams played out the season in a playoff fashion. UNC was #1 hands down. Pitt lost to Villanova twice. Villanova made it farther than them in the tournament. How can they not be ranked ahead of them? You listen to Sagarin and that's where you go wrong.

[El-Moldo]

Villanova won the first 4 games they played in the tournament. But they played almost 40 games during the season. How can you rank a team for the entire season BASED only on what they did in the tournament , and IGNORE what they did DURING the 4 months preceeding the tournament. So if Robert Morris gets lucky and wins 4 games in the tournament, they should be ranked in everybody's top 10?????? And as far as Sagarin is concerned, he's made a living studying and ranking college sports, and scientifically I might add. There's NOTHING wrong with his rankings. In fact, I would trust his poll more than the Coaches Poll. At least he's seen the teams play and has NO bias to certain teams and conferences.

[deliverance]

I didn't know you could win a championship by how you played in the first 40 games of the season? That's news to me. Texas beat Villanova. Am I going to sit here and say Texas is better than Villanova because they beat them months ago? No way. Am I going to say that Texas should be ranked ahead of Pitt because Texas beat Villanova by 10 and Pitt lost to Villanova by 10 and 2? No. Don't be stupid. Villanova is better than Pitt. It didn't only happen once, but twice. As far as a scientific method goes, that's not how you figure out sports. You figure it out by watching it. Sagarin probably doesn't watch a game all year. He just puts scores and standings into his system. A system that's absolutely awful, by the way. You'd know that if Pitt was ever any good in football.

[The Ancient Enemy]

Moldo, college sports (or any sport for that matter) is NOT absolute! You cannot conceive a mathematical equation that gives you an outcome of "I THINK THIS TEAM IS PROBABLY BETTER". There is no MAYBE and no PROBABLY in Math! NONE of the mathematical equations mean ANYTHING because we are not dealing with absolutes. Pitt does not beat Louisville 1,000,000 out of 1,000,000 times. But 4 is always greater than 3.

[El-Moldo]

Basing the final top 25 in college basketball is like basing your entire academic career on your SAT score. What about everything else you have done BEFORE taking the SAT's. Sure the tournament is a factor, but you have to consider THE ENTIRE SEASON. Let's face it, winning the NIT didn't help Penn State crack the top 25, and supposedly they almost made it to the dance. So how important was THAT.

[ham55]

Ahh yes, but if you had a 4.0 all the way through highschool and took your SAT's and only scored a 600, alot of redflags are raised.

Why don't you face it, moldo. This is a "what have you done for me lately" world we live in. There is no way that pinhead should have had Pitt in the top 3. You can sit here and argue football rankings until you're blue in the face because there is no tournament, no outcome determined on the field other than a match-up set up by computers based on math. In basketball, there's a tournament. The garbage will get washed out in the process of a tournament more often than not. Pitt happened to be some garbage that got washed out prior to the final 4. They were, AT BEST, the 6th best team in the nation AT SEASONS END.

Afterall, there are the seasons final rankings, right?

[The Ancient Enemy]

Moldo, the only way to feel any satisfaction with any rankings is to look at the data yourself, try to be as objective as possible, and make your own rankings. You are beating your head against the wall if you get bent out of shape over rankings. It's just opinions, and our opinion is just as valuable as Jeff Sagarin's or Phil Steele's. There's no way to rank any sports teams unless it is opinion based. Math doesn't work, because there are upsets.