(Written by kencraw)

I’ve written about this before, but the whole “I’m ranking this team lower because they have a tough schedule” thing really bugs me and Ted Miller recently brought it up in his mailbag post:

Paul from San Carlos, California, writes: Indulge a pet peeve: Those who downgrade a team in rankings for having a tough schedule. Rankings should be solely about which team is better. Which team has the easiest path to a good record should play no role.

Ted Miller: Fair point. So do we need a distinction?

Are we making predictions with rankings? If so, then schedule plays a role. If you were looking for a reason to worry about UCLA, schedule would be a good place to start. Conversely then, I’d rate Iowa a top-15 team.

Or are we ranking teams only based on how good we believe they are? If so, that methodology shouldn’t consider the schedule ahead, arduous or easy.

That said, most folks who do top-25 rankings based on their perception of how good a team is and what it has accomplished wouldn’t take their list to Vegas and use it religiously. Sometimes a team “deserves” a ranking, even if you wouldn’t bet your hard earned money that it would beat a team you rank a few notches lower.

Here’s what I think Ted Miller misses (most people do frankly): The only reason this is an issue is because everybody knows that the end of season rankings overly penalize losses and don’t look at qualitative factors. They don’t think about it directly, but it’s true. What they’re saying is, they’re expected that this “tough schedule” team to lose a couple not because they’re not good but because of their tough schedule, and they just know that at the end of the season the rankings won’t take that into account, so they’ll be ranked lower than they should.

That’s why it’s doubly infuriating to me. It appears there are two things that determine the end of season ranking: Initial seeding (if you started #1 and you don’t lose, you’ll end #1) and number of loses.

So if the end of season ranking is going to over emphasize number of loses, it’s quite a double whammy to also lower their initial seeding (aka their preseason ranking). If anything we should be giving them a bump at the beginning of the season.

Of course the real solution is to have the end of the season ranking appropriately reflect strength of schedule, but until then, let’s not further cripple teams with tough schedules by ranking them lower to start the season.