My college tournament plays out the initial rounds by using a combination of how the teams (say A versus B and C versus D) performed in their bowl games, and then using computer ratings to determine how games would turn out if A played C and B played D, if that was how my tournament pairings were laid out. If I was lucky, I'd have some actual bowl games that corresponded to one of my pretend games, like Oklahoma versus Connecticut this year. One memorable real life bowl that also happened to be one of my tournament match-ups was #2 Texas losing to #7 Georgia in the 1984 Cotton Bowl. If I would have generated a result like that from my method, it probably would have seemed improbable. Another real life game that was one of my tournament games was Oklahoma and Boise State's Fiesta Bowl. Again, if I had come up with a Bronco win using my method, it probably would have seemed flawed.
As a Chicago native, I initially used the Dunkel Index, a computer ranking system that was available in the Chicago Tribune's Sports Section. Time went by, newspapers scaled back, and the Dunkel Ratings became harder to find. So I switched to USA Today's Sagarin Ratings for my tournament. These ratings are part of my "pre-specified" methods, so that no matter what happens with the games, all I have to do is plug numbers into a spreadsheet to get my results.
Anyway, in my tournament, the #3 versus #6 game was between TCU and Ohio State. TCU won by two over Wisconsin in real life, and Ohio State beat Arkansas by five. My methods plugged these results along with the Sagarin ratings to speculate that OSU would beat TCU by one if they had met on the field, and play they way they did in their bowls. The main reason TCU was down-graded was that Sagarin ranked one-loss Wisconsin as the 14th best team in the country, whereas Arkansas was in the top 10. TCU beating Wisconsin by only two left the door wide open for Ohio State in my tournament, although Arkansas had a chance in the last minute to win, which would have given the Horned Frogs a win versus the Buckeyes in my pretend world. And just from my perspective, I think early Sugar Bowl OSU was the most impressive team of those four in their bowl, and I think if the Buckeyes had lined up for the two-point conversion rather than the Badgers to tie TCU in the waning minutes of the Rose Bowl, I think the Bucks would have gotten the job done.
Just because I am a curious guy, I took a look at the Dunkel Index last week, which is now run by a third generation of Dunkels and published on-line. I immediately noticed that Dunkel had TCU #4 and Wisconsin #5 prior to the bowls, with OSU and Arkansas in the bottom five of the top ten. I didn't need to do the calculations, it was immediately apparent. If I had used Dunkel, TCU would have beaten OSU by four to five points.
Now, there were things I always liked about Dunkel. It seemed to allow the top team or teams to get a much higher rating than their peers than Sagarin seems to do. For instance, I bet the Auburn post-bowl Dunkel rating is much higher than their peers, whereas Sagarin has Auburn and Stanford only 0.01 apart. At this stage of the tournament, I use the computer ratings with a distribution based on how variable teams play based on the non-BCS bowl games. In short, my Auburn-Stanford semi-final is basically a coin flip. Based on Auburn pushing around Oregon's offensive line, I think that seems less plausible that Auburn and Stanford are basically even Steven. Or maybe Andrew Luck would provide more passing precision for Stanford than Oregon showed, and the Cardinal would have greater offensive success.
But the downside of Dunkel is what I referred to in the last paragraph, I have to speculate on the post-bowl ratings. Dunkel hasn't updated them yet, and I use the post bowl ratings for my semi-finals and championship game. Sagarin's were published soon after the last piece of confetti hit the University of Phoenix turf after the championship. So for this year, Sagarin is my system. Sorry TCU, you narrowly beat a team that Sagarin didn't love. In general, his scores don't love most of the Big Ten. Michigan State beat Wisconsin, and lost to only Iowa and Alabama, yet they finish the season as #31 in Sagarin's post-bowl standings.
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