Ohio State tops final regular season HWFC Computer Ratings of 2007 Season.

The final regular season computer poll for 2007 mirrored the final BCS Standings, with Ohio State number 1 and LSU second. These two will face each other in the BCS Championship game.

Arkansas, the reigning Heavyweight Football National Champion, is ranked 34th, and will face 5th ranked Missouri in the Cotton Bowl. Idaho slipped into last place in the 120 team rankings.

Other Weeks: Oct 13  Oct 20  Oct 27  Nov 3  Nov 10  Nov 17  Nov 24  Dec 1 

The Computer Poll

How IT WORKS

The premise is very simple. A team gains points for the quality of the teams it beats. It loses points for the lack of quality of teams that beats it. In other words, it can only gain points by winning, it can only lose points by losing.

A team will not gain points for a loss. The reason for this is simple: It doesn't matter if you are LSU or Northern Illinois, a loss is a loss. Now, you would not lose as many points if you lose to LSU as you would by losing to Northern Illinois.

To begin with, a team gains a point for a win over a D1A team. It loses a point for a loss (no matter who the loss is to). A bowl eligible team is a fairly standard definition of quality. Simplified, that means a win over a team with 6 D1a wins is worth a bonus point. Expanding this further, every win by a team that you beat is worth 1/6 of a bonus point.

Now we also know there is a lot of range in 6 win teams. A 6 win team in the Southeast Conference will likely be a lot stronger than many other 6 win teams that have a weaker schedule. So we added an element that better identifies the quality of wins by those teams you beat. Hopefully this does not sound too confusing: If you beat a team that has earned a lot of quality points that should be worth more than beating a team that has as many wins but against poor competition. To make this work, we add another bonus point for every 36 wins by teams beaten by teams you beat.

So you gain points purely based on wins. That is how it should be. At the same time you lose a point for every loss, and you lose additional points for how bad the teams are that beat you (the exact reverse of how we figure bonus points for losses - thus if you lose to a 2-9 team you lose a point and a half, and then you lose further points based on how bad the teams are that beat the teams that beat you. I do not award points for wins over out-of-division teams. A loss to an out-of-division team (such as Michigans loss to Appalachian State) is treated like losing to an 0-12 team, thus losing 1 point for the loss and losing 2 points for the losses by the team that beat you, thus a 3 point deduction.

In the end, you gain points for wins. You lose points for losses. You take the sum of those gains and losses and divide by the number of games you played, and that is your rating.