College football conference over/under ratings

Previously we showed the perception of individual teams in the polls . As promised Matlabgeeks analyzed the conference over/underratings using Matlab, and found similar tendencies in both the AP and Coach’s polls over the last 10 years. A bias towards favoring east coast teams is shown during the preseason, only to have those teams/conferences under perform expectations, while the west coast conferences, including the Pac-10, WAC and MWC have all exceeded expectations by the postseason rankings. Most notable is the lack of respect shown the non-BCS conferences (of course). The bottom three conferences in both polls? ACC, Big 12 and SEC. Let’s take a look at how the analysis was performed:
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Oregon among the most underrated college football teams; Florida State brings up the rear

Over at Matlab Geeks Headquarters, we’ve been busy analyzing the AP and Coaches’ Polls to see how the data look, and interestingly enough, some of my preconceived notions about the Oregon Ducks were confirmed. The final results showed that the top 5 under-rated programs in the country were: Boise State, Utah, TCU, Iowa and Oregon. The top 5 over-rated schools? Florida State, Tennessee, Michigan, Florida and Clemson. Don’t just take my word for it, let’s see how we got these results…

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College Football Rankings and How to use Database Queries in Matlab

This week at Matlabgeeks, seeing as one of us is a huge Oregon Ducks fan, we are going to investigate the AP and Coaches polls for college football. As the BCS only reports in midseason and does not do a ranking following the bowl games, we are throwing it out for this analysis. (Note: the BCS is more appropriately named BS, but as this is not a sports blog, I’ll hold off on the playoffs spiel and how the BCS/6 big conferences are just money grubbing the system :). I just want an opportunity to watch the 2001 Ducks team take out Miami).  Instead we want to utilize this opportunity to demonstrate how powerful Matlab is, and how you can use this program to analyze any data set.

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