Making Sense of the BCS Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech Mess

Half the fun of watching college football is seeing how teams can put together win-loss records so convoluted that any rational person would just say “put them all in a tournament and let the teams decide.” Yet somehow, there is no tournament so we're left saying "I hope this team wins so we'll have another BCS mess" . . . which happens quite often.

This year is no exception. We have a number of one loss and undefeated teams who all could win the national championship if given a chance. Most interesting is Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech. For those of you who don’t follow college football, all three of these teams have 11 wins and 1 loss. Each teams’ loss comes from one of the other two. In other words Oklahoma beat Texas Tech, Texas Tech beat Texas, and Texas beat Oklahoma.

In high school I learned about the transitive property. The transitive property pretty much says if Adam is taller than Bob and Bob is taller than Chris, Adam must be taller than Chris. But what if someone said Chris is taller than Adam. The who is the tallest? We have a paradox. And that’s how sports works.

This here is humble attempt to explain why Oklahoma is better than Texas Tech and Texas.

First of all, I didn’t watch all these games so I do not understand the nuances of each win and loss. Second, I’m not really taking into account whether each team played home or away. For the most part, I’m only looking at wins and losses. I really hate it when teams run up the score to look good for the rankings so I’m not even looking at margin of victory either.

So let’s start. Here’s the records for each team. Click on the chart for a bigger view.

The first two rows show that each team lost and won to the others. So I say those games cancel each other out (hence the strike through).

The next four rows show that each team beat Oklahoma State, Kansas, Baylor and Texas A&M. Cancel those out too.

The highlighted yellow portion shows quality wins (we’ll get back to that).

And the bottom rows show the wins over scrub schools not going to bowl games or non Division 1 schools (or whatever they call Division 2 now-a-days). Mind as well ignore those too.

Back to the highlighted portion: This is the meat of the analysis. On the left is each team’s ranking according to the Harris poll today (for the top 25 teams) and the Rivas Top 120 of last week for the other teams.

Short explanation is that Oklahoma has more quality wins than the other two. I submit that Oklahoma’s two wins over #15 TCU and #16 Cincinnati is better than Texas’ two wins over #11 Missouri and #63 Rice. Also, look at Texas Tech; their next best win is over #38 Nebraska.

Therefore, I say, eliminating the constants (aka wins over the same teams) and ignoring the wins over weak schools reveals that Oklahoma is the better of the three.