By Dennis Dodd
CBS SportsLine Senior Writer
Oct. 24, 1998
The man who might decide the participants in this year's national championship game could, at this moment, be pouring over videotapes. Is it Ohio State or UCLA?
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Neither. Try Leave It To Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show.
"He's got to be one of the all-time fans of those shows," says a close acquaintance. "He's even got an Eddie Haskell letter jacket."
A night out on the town for the man charged with college football's awesome task might include a plate of chicken wings and a beer. Guard him in a pick-up hoops game and you better bring your "A" game. No weak stuff is allowed.
His Saturdays are spent not in a press box or on a sideline somewhere but lounging in front of a television watching college football in Bloomington, Ind. It turns out that Jeff Sagarin is one of us. He is an Everyman with a slide rule and an attitude. The difference is that the author of the quarter-century old Sagarin college football ratings, finds himself in an accustomed position of power this season.
And if you don't like it, tough.
"FOR ARGUMENT'S SAKE, LET'S say there are better mathematicians than me," said Sagarin, a 1970 MIT graduate. "I hate even imagining that to be true. Let's say there are people out there that know more about sports than I do. I'd say the intersection of those two sets is the null set. You won't find people who are mathematicians working on sports."
Not like Sagarin. If you talk to him bring an algebra text and an understanding of street life. Sagarin grew up both in New York and Boston. But it seems no one bothered to ask him about it until now. SEC commissioner Roy Kramer drafted Sagarin as a participant in the BCS poll in part because of his mathematical credibility.
Real-life
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Joe Germaine and the Buckeyes are under pressure to impress Jeff Sagarin.
(AP)
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Few question his assertions because, let's face it, few can understand them. His formula that takes into account victory margin and strength of schedule is a closely guarded secret. While the major polls have Ohio State and UCLA 1-2, Sagarin's computer lists Kansas State and UCLA as the top two.
"I don't trust computers," Florida State coach Bobby Bowden huffed in the typical bewilderment of coaches. "Those computers lie."
Maybe so, but since college football can't come to an agreement on how to produce a champion, they've gone to cold, hard objectivity. Sagarin started his football ratings in September 1972 as a way to play with his beloved numbers. As publications began to pick up his ratings, Sagarin's popularity grew.
HE WAS A CONSULTANT TO the NCAA basketball tournament committee back in 1981 on what eventually became the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) used to select the field of 64 each year. USA Today has run Sagarin's football ratings each week during the season since 1985.
The index was a nice conversation piece until this year when it was selected along with two other computer indexes to help pick the top two teams in the country. The combination of polls, computer indexes and Sagarin's own strength of schedule will be used to determine the teams playing in the Fiesta Bowl Jan. 4 in Tempe, Ariz.
It's not much of a stretch to say that no other person has more individual influence on the selection process than Sagarin.
"He's one of those geniuses," said Bob Hammel, longtime sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times. "He's a couple of notches above the rest of us."
Sagarin wears the genius label like it was a refrigerator magnet in his Bloomington, Ind. home. Nothing matters, it seems, and what if it did? Look on his personal website and there is a 20-year-old picture of him with a former girlfriend. "You can see," he reminds you. "I was no computer dweeb."
He grew up in the tough Dorchester section of Boston with a love of numbers and sports. The numbers could roil around in his head. His sports prowess was played out like any male in his coming-of-age ritual. "Sometimes the off-the-court action was as entertaining as on-court," he said. "Those were the days when they had the school busing riots."
AFTER MIT, SAGARIN FOLLOWED a friend to Indiana to pursue an MBA and never left. Professors provided him access to school computers. Playgrounds allowed him access to hoops where he would hold his own against some of Bobby Knight's players.
"I love living in a college town," Sagarin said. "College guys will e-mail me and I get to go to birthday parties when they're 21. These guys get completely drunk. You almost forget you were that young after a while."
It seems Sagarin never forgets his youth. He is a parking lot security guard for campus bars each year during the Little 500, the bike race glamorized in the movie Breaking Away.
"This one college kid I know, jokes about that," Sagarin said. "He says, 'I show up at three in the morning at the bar just to say hello to Jeff. There are two police cars in the parking lot, there's people screaming, somebody's got a bloody face and there's Sagarin wiping his mouth off from eating chicken wings.'"
Hammel remembers talking to Kramer, then chairman of the basketball committee, back in 1981. The committee had become enamored with Sagarin's numbers and wanted to see the face behind the math.
Hammel recalls asking Kramer, "Roy, do you really want to do that?"
DESPITE THE CRUSTY REPUTATION of both, Knight and Sagarin hold arms-length respect for each other. Knight, it is told, was impressed that Sagarin had Indiana ranked No. 1 going into the 1981 tournament eventually won by the Hoosiers. That team, at the time, had most losses (nine) of any NCAA champion in history.
"We're not enemies, we're not friends," Sagarin said. "We're two guys in the same town."
At this rate, though, Sagarin's legend will surpass Knight's. In Bloomington, Sagarin is a man about town, not a coach in an ivory tower.
"He's always the butt of the joke, even his own stories," Hammel said. "He says, 'There are things that happen in life only to me and Woody Allen.' I can't believe he hasn't been on some of these college football telecasts. He could be a great five-minute addition each week."
"If they mention my name on TV," Sagarin said. "Maybe it will impress a girl at a bar."
There are only a few ways to get a serious rise out of this half-century old frat boy. Ask about a significant other and he grows quiet, "My good stuff vanished away. I get depressed when I think about that. Somebody died and I don't want to get into that."
IT IS LESS MAUDLIN TO MENTION the Seattle Times and New York Times that also have computer ratings which are used by the BCS. He dismisses both with a wave of his calculator.
"When I read Seattle they'll say, 'We're clearly the best system,'" Sagarin said. ". ...When people state something and their proof is I've stated it, therefore it's true, that's not proof. I try to resist falling into that myself.
"People say, 'How come yours (rating system) is the best, Jeff?' I can't give you a two-sentence answer. I would say if one were to trust me, I do have the degree from MIT. I do have 30 years of work on this. I always have mathematical underpinnings for what I'm doing."
Which is why Kansas State fans should love the guy. The only place you'll find the Wildcats No. 1 is in the Sagarin ratings. All those non-conference corpses the Wildcats pounded early in the season have significance. Sagarin takes margin victory into account, no matter who it's against. K-State beat Indiana State, Northeast Louisiana and Northern Illinois by a combined 201-14.
"If you win by 1,000 it is better than winning by two," Sagarin said.
That'll be great news for UCLA which has battled Texas, Houston and has Miami on Dec. 5. Or Ohio State which had West Virginia, Toledo and Missouri. It seems that even with computers, nothing is absolute in college football without a playoff.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO a classic barroom argument. Playoff vs. BCS.
"Whenever anyone asks, I'd like to see a 16-team playoff," Sagarin said. "(In the current system) it's not always-quote-the best two teams. I'd rather see them play. I know how close teams really are in the computer. To have some school get decimal-pointed out because they were third, is terrible."
If you look closely, along with all those computer files, Sagarin is opening his heart.
Dennis Dodd is a senior writer in CBS SportsLine's Kansas City bureau.