I wrote about the secrecy of the coaches poll last week. BCS guru Jerry Palm took it a step further revealing on his website (collegebcs.com) this week that there was a miscalculation in the Colley Matrix, one of the six computers used in the BCS formula.
Colley is the only one of the six who makes his formula public. Therefore Palm, and others, can check it from week to week. Far be it from me to be able to check math. I have problems helping my sixth grader with area and perimeter.
Anyway, it turns out that Colley, Palm states, forgot to input two games this season -- Idaho at Hawaii and UC-Davis at San Diego. Idaho-Hawaii had no impact on the numbers. However, UC-Davis-San Diego did matter.
Palm says that the BCS got erroneous data from Colley this week. Hold onto your computers. It didn't matter in the BCS top 25 but that's not the point.
The point, as I stated last week, is that we have no way of knowing if any of these indexes or polls are on the up-and-up. I still haven't determined if the Harris Poll has an oversight system that would, say, catch a bogus ballot that would rank Texas 25th and Oklahoma No. 1. At least the coaches poll has some oversight built in but not much.
The computers, though, scare me more. Colley owned up to his mistake. The five other computer guys won't so much as release their formulas. With all these numbers flying around are we just supposed to assume that everything is accurate?
Just another reason to be afraid of the BCS.
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