Her Math Puts BCS Formula to Shame

The ranking system that determines who plays for college football’s national championship is derided nearly universally, not to mention annually, and though this year’s first set of Bowl Championship Series standings don’t come out until Oct. 18, the detractors might have a new champion: a 22-year-old undergrad at a small Oregon college that doesn’t even have a football team.

Pacific University’s Maggie Wigness has an algorithm that, based on games played in 1998-2008, got things right at better than a 70% clip—far better than the BCS formula’s score of 56.6%. And, Wigness tells the Oregonian ahead of her presentation of it Saturday at a Harvard symposium, “we didn’t look at the human factors at all”—unlike the BCS, which relies on two different polls of coaches and others.
(More Bowl Championship Series stories.)