Statistics in Football and Politics

The college football season has just wrapped up with the BCS National Championship game, and the new President is about to be inaugurated. We have developed statistical approaches to both of these disparate topics. First, I will discuss the Colley Matrix method for ranking college football teams. This method is used by the BCS as one of the six official computer rankings that help seed the National Championship game. The
method is rooted in an old gambling formula due to Laplace and a straight-forward correction for "strength of schedule." I will then turn to a method developed by J. Richard Gott, III, and myself for predicting winners of Presidential elections. Here we apply median statistics state-by-state to form our best guess as to the final electoral returns. In 2004 and 2008, our method called the winner correctly and missed only 1 and 3 states, for a net 4 and 2 electoral votes, respectively.

Wes Colley

UAHuntsville