Say hello to your Big Ten overlords
by Ken Pomeroy on Tuesday, October 30, 2012
I’ve rolled the site over to 2013, fresh with my stab at pre-season ratings and reasonably accurate schedules. (If you see something wrong with your team’s information, kindly drop me a line.)
These rankings might not match what you’ve seen in any other venue. The uniqueness is due to two general reasons. First, my computer doesn’t see everything humans see, and for the most part, humans have an advantage here. I generally think humans do a good job of assimilating data this time of year, with perhaps the exception of overvaluing a long tournament run fueled by close wins or a favorable draw. Even then, it’s just a hunch on my part that people overvalue that. I could be the one undervaluing postseason performance.
The other reason is that my computer doesn’t know what humans are thinking. This is mostly an advantage to the computer. I think the AP preseason poll is useful, but one criticism I have of it is that voters’ ballots are a bit too similar. Of this year’s ballots, in what should be a more difficult year to predict, just two of 65 voters had Indiana outside the top 3, and those two had the Hoosiers at number four.