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Home » Recreation And Sports Articles » The Sagarin College Football Ratings What They Are How To Read Them And What To Do With Them

The Sagarin College Football Ratings: What They Are, How to Read Them and What to Do With Them

While betting on sports is only legal in a few places in the United States, such as Las Vegas, millions of office workers are involved in sports pools every week now that the football season has arrived.

When you know that more than $700 million can be bet on one gamethe Super Bowlin only Las Vegas, then you understand that billions were bet illegally on the Super Bowl last year in the United States and in offshore sports books around the world.

Folks in the gaming business know that more than a billion dollars is wagered on every Monday Night Football game during the season.

For those who wager, it may be helpful to put some science on your side when you wager, and one of the best places to do that is with the Sagarin College Football Ratings.

Created by Jeff Sagarin, a 1970 MIT mathematics graduate, these computer ratings are for Division I-A (what the NCAA now calls the Football Bowl (FB) Subdivision) and Division I-AA (what the NCAA now calls the Football Championship (FC) Subdivision) teams.

You will have to forgive the NCAA for taking titles that have been used for years and are perfectly clear, then renaming them and creating confusion in the process.

If there is a way for the NCAA to assert its superior power, it does so by making everything more difficult and confusing, similar to your United States government and its IRS tax code which could reduce a sane person to tears just reading it.

Anyway, the Sagarin rating is a numerical measure of a team's strength.

A hypothetical victory margin is determined by comparing the rating of the two teams after adding 2.93 points to the home team. The home edge will vary during the season.

Only Division I (both A and AA) are counted for rating and schedule strength during the season.

A diminishing-returns principle exists to prevent teams from building up ratings by running up large victory margins against weak teams. Instead, it rewards teams that do well against good opponents.

The BCS (Bowl Championship Series) does not factor in scoring margin. For Sagarin ratings and more detailed information go to: www.usatoday.com

USA Today, the largest circulation newspaper in the United States, is the nation's daily newspaper and carries the Sagarin College Football Ratings. The ratings are updated following each week's games and published in USA Today on Wednesdays.

Following the first week of college football action, here are some facts that interested me about Sagarin's first-week ratings:

1) Washington, one of the poor to mediocre teams in the country the last several years, was rated No. 31 after hammering Syracuse 42-14 in its home opener.

2) Michigan State, another short end of the stick team for far too long, was rated No. 36 after steamrolling over UAB 55-18 in its home opener.

3) Appalachian State, a AA school, was rated No. 38 following its upset of mighty Michigan 34-32 on Michigan's home field. The win was the biggest upset in college football history as no AA team had ever beaten a ranked team.

Michigan was ranked No. 5 by both the AP Poll and Coaches Poll going into the game. Following its horrendous loss, Michigan ended up being ranked No. 40 by Sagarin.

4) Wyoming, a small school and never among the nation's top teams, was ranked No. 41 by Sagarin following its 23-3 home victory over Virginia.

5) Notre Dame, beaten badly (33-3) by Georgia Tech, was rated No. 57 after the loss. Georgia Tech was rated No. 2. The Irish failed to score a touchdown for the first time ever in their home opener.

6) Temple (ranked No. 143 after its opening loss) and Buffalo (ranked No. 145 after its opening loss) face off in week two. Both teams are among the 7 worst Division I-A teams in the country, joining Louisiana-Monroe, Rice, Duke, Utah State and Florida International.

7) A total of 242 teams, 119 A schools and 123 AA schools, make up the Sagarin College Football Ratings. The worst-rated A school is Florida International at No. 174 (56 AA teams are rated better), and their play reflects their rating. The worst-rated AA school is the No. 242 La Salle Explorers. La Salle is a Catholic university located in Philadelphia.

La Salle lost its home opener to Ursinus 28-0. Ursinus is not a planet but a real liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.

Ursinus College is not a Division 1 school (which includes the 242 teams with La Salle), not a Division II team (which includes another 157 teams), but a Division III team. Now you can better understand why La Salle College is ranked last among 242 Division I schools.

The first job for La Salle this year will be to score a touchdown, or any points, including a field goal or touchback. The Explorers next job will be to actually win a game. Good luck, La Salle, and God speed.

Copyright © 2007 Ed Bagley

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Financial Freedom - What Is That Really?

Is your business working, really working? If not pick up a pencil and write down quickly why not. It should take you about 30 seconds at most. Go on write it down.

Those of you who have worked with me know the answer....go look in the mirror. The answer lies there. That's the bad news. Here's the good news. Go look in the mirror the answer lies there.

You are both the problem and the solution... good thing 'cause you can't change anybody but you.

In the next few paragraphs I'm going to give you my thoughts on why I think most people have difficulty getting their businesses off the ground. Or to be more to the point...why it's so tough to find and start recruits.

How many times have you heard "Financial Freedom" when you ask someone what they want out of their home business?

What does that mean really? I know the "stock" answer, "So money isn't a consideration any more." But is that really what we're looking for?

I think people are looking for a freedom much deeper than money. It's a freedom to live in tune with who they really are.

I'm going to paraphrase something Timothy Gallwey said in his book "The Inner Game Of Work." We don't really want to be free of our responsibilities but rather we want to be who we really are as we perform those responsibilities.

It's Gallwey's premise that we get into trouble when we start work or live our lives in line with external pressures. Suddenly we're dancing to someone else's dance rather than our own. We find ourselves working for rewards that someone else thinks are important, not what we really think is important. Does this sound like a job? Playing politics and often being something we're really not. We are just not being completely authentic.

Personally, I think this is a huge reason people come into a network marketing business. They are tired of being who their job requires them to be. Please notice that I said who their job requires them to be not what they have to do. It isn't about the work.

Unfortunately I think this is a big reason people don't stay in their networking business. They quit and go away because in our zeal to create duplication we push conformity rather than creativity and fun. Duplication has come to mean "be just like me, or just like my upline." Like their job, your new recruit doesn't get to be who they are in their new business either.

I don't think we need to do that to create duplication. I think if we want real duplication in our businesses we need people to tap into (maybe for the first time) who they really are as well as what they really want from their business. Think about this, if you're getting to be exactly who you are, and your making money too are you going to keep doing it?

Then it's up to us to pass along the tools we have in our business tool kits to help them build that business within their personal integrity. It's the tools that need to be duplicated. We're not cloning people. As sponsors we're here to facilitate people developing.

Now before any of you start to bounce off the walls, I am not advocating chaos, or encouraging people to be hobbyist rather than business builders or that you should be a babysitter or a therapist. I think our job as sponsors is not to tell people how to run their businesses but rather we give them the tools and help them develop the skills they need to run their businesses. And therein lies the rub. Often we don't have the skills ourselves.

Let's talk about how to pass along business tools. In a simple, organized systematic non cluttered way. Let me give you an example.

Do you think the new person in your business would like to have a good year? How would you go about showing them how to do that?

I encourage you before you read on to take a pen and write down how you would have them think about this? Go on do that now. It may be just that ah ha moment you've been waiting for.

If you've written a couple of things ask yourself if they fall into what I consider the basic building block of business. That is, until we can break anything down to a step-by-step process we really don't have a handle on it. As usual I'm not just going to give you the answer to this but rather ask you to walk through this process with me.

This is what I'd write to the question I asked you above, "If the goal is to have a good year what do we need first?"

A good six months....

What does it take to have a good six months?

A good quarter....

And to put a good quarter under your belt you need a good month.

What does a good month take? Simple a good week.

And to have that bang up week you simply need a good day. What does it take to fall into bed at night and be happy with the day you've had...you need a few really good hours.

Coaching tip: I could certainly have just leapt to the "have a good hour" but would it have had as much an impression? Typically by taking someone through a step-by-step process until you reach the bottom line you can enroll them in what you're doing. When we are enrolled it becomes our idea?

Do your tools help your organization build their business in a systematic step-by-step method? When you sponsor someone do you give them really good business tools that put them into money making activity in the first few hours at the helm of their business?

Here are some basic sponsor responsibilities that I think are necessary to launch a new recruit.

- Something that brings home to them that they are the CEO of their own business â€" it's not a game or a hobby

- They need to know when they are going to work and not work. Real hours just like any business â€" (their choice not yours).

- They need to know exactly what activity it takes to make money versus admin activity.

- They need to know when they are doing the money making activity

- They need to know when they are doing the admin activity

- They need a business vision â€" where will they be in six months, a year and five years down the road

- They need a personal vision â€" what can they learn about themselves and how to make every activity they do in their business fun, fun, fun.....

And here's the deal. Take a coaching approach to make this happen. You don't just hand someone a "getting started booklet" and expect that they will take it home and make it work. Take a page out of McDonald's and put your new recruit through your networking university. Think back to when you were in school. You were not handed a book and tested on it at the end of the semester. You were taught, coached and interacted with the material. Why? 'Cause it is how we learn. You don't just give someone instructions and tell them what to do.

I'm in your face here a bit because I see it all day. People telling others what to do and then wondering why people don't do it! It's simple:

Since you were two years old you didn't like being told what to do (what's a two year old's favorite word?) and most likely you still don't....neither does anyone else. And particularly by someone who most likely isn't doing all the things they are advocating! Sorry about this, but it's really important to be honest with ourselves here.

So if the shoe fits wear it. If not enjoy your business...it should be flourishing.

But if it's not, that's why we've designed the Get Your Year in Gear program. If you want a step by step process you can make your own that will:

- Allow you to be who you want to be in your business all the time

- Coach you so you can coach your team to become all they can be

Then get your rear into the Get Your Year In Gear program. It is the place to start. It is not all the answers but it will bring up questions you've never thought of and help you to design your own business in such a way to begin to live your life right now on your terms. Then and only then can you attract others who want to do the same and coach them to do so.

I have said before, you'll be safe but you're bs won't be. Are you ready to make 2006 your best year yet? I'm on board for it, are you?

© 2006 Jillian Middleton All rights reserved.