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I hope you had a good one!  I know my family did with my brother pulling down a Macbook Pro and my sister getting a Sony Reader and a Blu Ray player.

And now here we are.  The final entry.  Part 3.

How coaches from one conference vote for various conferences

I only looked at the six BCS conferences here because I have to imagine you don’t care very much about the differences in voting between the Sun Belt and Conference-USA.

There’s not a whole lot to say here, it shows up pretty much how you’d expect.  Conferences rank their members higher, rank conferences close to them hire (ACC and SEC, Big 12 and Big Ten) and rank teams who are toss-ups with their own much lower (Big East ranking Florida 6th).  I think that the Pac-10 wins “Worst voter” award, although the ACC is pretty close thanks to the breadth of bad votes (mostly due to Bobby Bowden).

I hope you’ve learned this by now, but click the pictures to get a full sized version.

ACC Teams

Big 12 Teams

Big East Teams

Big Ten Teams

Pac 10 Teams

SEC Teams

And one final little nugget, a breakdown of how the top 25 would shake out under each conferences voting patterns.  The numbers to the right of the team are the number of points they earned.

And now, part 2

How coaches from BCS conferences and mid-majors vote

The point of this is to see whether or not coaches in BCS conferences are making an obvious attempt to keep mid-major teams lower in the rankings, and thus lowering their chances for BCS games.  One reason to do this would be that mid-major teams in lower bowls means more money for the six major conferences to individually split among their members.

Similarly, the mid-major coaches may want to see one of their own do well, and thus will try to rank them higher than they probably deserve.

This one is going to be more pictures and less talk. Click any picture for a full-size version.

First, the votes for BCS teams by BCS conference and mid-major conference coaches.

And now votes for mid-major teams by these two groups

While the numbers do show a bias for coaches to vote for teams in their same classification there isn’t a huge difference, especially in the BCS Bowl spots.

Some of the biggest differences: Nebraska, Wisconsin, Arizona, Houston and East Carolina.

The part I like the most about this is the effect on the bottom end of the coaches vote, the last teams some coaches add to their top 25.  Oklahoma, UNC and UGA only received votes from BCS conference coaches.  Troy, Nevada and Middle Tennessee State only received votes from mid-major coaches.

One more picture: the top 25 (and other receiving votes) for each classification

Not a huge difference between the two until you get into the middle rankings.

This is part 1 in what will probably be only a 3 part series, although I’d love to do more if I find the time.

The whole purpose behind this is to find evidence of bias in the secret poll that accounts for 33% of a team’s chance at a BCS bowl. The three things I am looking at initially are as follows:

1) The effects of coaches voting for their own team
2) How coaches from BCS conferences and mid-majors vote for these two classifications
3) How coaches from one conference vote for various conferences

This is part one, and part two will hopefully be up in the next day or two.

The effects of coaches voting for their own team

It seems kinda silly, first of all, that you would ask a coach who works 16 hours a day 340 days a year to rank nearly a quarter of the 120 teams playing DI-A football. Now add that to the fact that they are allowed to vote for their own team, who they are infinitely more familiar with than anyone else out there. Do you think there’s a 1% chance that Steve Spurrier watched a Wisconsin game this year even though he ranked them 20th?

So, here is a nice little breakdown of the coaches whose teams ended up receiving at least a single vote. I used the points formula instead of ranking (25 points = 1st place, 24 = 2nd, etc) so that averages make more sense. (click the picture for higher resolution)

So, as you can see, most coaches’ for their own team are inflated (props to Mike Riley, Jeff Tedford, Steve Spurrier, Ken Niumatalolo and Mark Richt for being the most fair. Tressel fans: obviously he did well also, but it’s harder to rank yourself higher when there are 5 undefeateds and 2 obviously better teams).

Now, some people could go through these and say that other coaches did decently too. “Hey, Mike Leach didn’t vote much higher than the average of people who voted for Texas Tech!” you could say. And that’s correct, but it’s also correct that 52 out of 59 people also didn’t even have them on their ballot, so giving them their second highest ranking (behind Bo Pelini, I can’t wait for the conference analysis) is pretty bad.

On average, coaches gave their team 2.23 more points than a random voter, and 0.87 more points than a random voter who we know voted for his team.

Ultimate punk list (based strictly off the numbers, not any of my own rankings)
5 – Bo Pelini – 6 spots higher than the average Nebraska voter (55/59 voted)
4 – Jim Harbaugh – over 9 spots higher than the average Stanford voter (52/59 voted)
3 – Bob Stoops – one of only two people to vote for Oklahoma, ranked them 23rd (Bobby Bowden had them 24th. We know he’s senile because he had Cal at 19, Clemson at 22, and USC at 23)
2 – Gary Pinkel – one of only two people to vote for Missouri, ranked them 22nd (Ken Niumatalolo had them 25th)

And the #1 total punk who is part of what is ruining college football

1 – Butch Davis – the ONLY PERSON out of 59 coaches who could find a reason to rank 8-4 North Carolina, he ranked them 24th, over Wisconsin and Houston among others.

So, the project I was so keen on finishing was going to look for biases in the final USA Today Coaches’ Poll since they actually release the votes one time per year.

The problem is, I got waaaay too in depth trying to find relationships.  As much as I’d love to research the history of every coach and assistant at each of these schools, I couldn’t do it.  For an example of what I mean, it is pretty awesome and telling that the 3 people who voted Georgia Tech #7 (the highest we received) where Ken Niumatalolo, the Navy head coach who worked with Paul Johnson for 6 years after playing under him, Charlie Weatherbie, who has Navy connections, and Dan Mullen, who played against Georgia Tech this year.  I’d love to be able to go through 59 voters and 42 teams and find all of these relationships and see what they cause.

Unfortunately, I just don’t have time for that so I’m going to stick to how coaches ranked their own team if that was an option, how they ranked teams in their conference, and how they ranked teams in the BCS conferences versus mid-majors.

That should be plenty good enough and I can get it up and finished by tomorrow.

The guy who I was supposed to sublet an apartment from in NYC this summer through a mutual friend was highlighted in Fred Wilson’s post on Tenacity today.

I knew that name looked familiar.  I guess it’s hard to forget a name like Pacheco.

Well played Facebook.

To be honest, I kinda want to go though.

I emailed in my final paper for Managing Rapid Growth and Business Turnaround earlier this week and just got an email back from the professor with a pretty interesting question.  For my paper I wrote about Facebook’s rapid growth and how the management/mismanagement helped or held back the company.  It was a pretty fun exercise and I learned a lot more about the backroom workings of the company (which were pretty chaotic for the first 4 years with no senior executives really sticking around that long) and had to try and come up with how that impacted the business.

Anyway, here’s the email I got that I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

Ryan – nice job – I do  wonder if you are “objective” about the founder – he clearly has a lot of positive founder attributes . . . but he also has a great deal of baggage.  It is interesting to question if he has a “company” or a website, I think.  Nice job overall, though – thanks for it.  A-

Is it a big-c Company?  What makes a Company?  Would you rather have a website?

You’ll have to excuse my absence lately, but Thanksgiving holidays and reports/presentations on successful brand management for Mitsubishi Electric HVAC units, and how Facebook culture allowed them to grow successfully have pretty much taken up my time.

All you really need to know about these two are penguins

and a hacker meritocracy with focused and practical incentives.