Grading the Rankers, Sporting News

Mid Summer is a time of fireworks, camping, trips, and of course College Football prognostication. From now until mid august there will be an increasing number of people, publications, and organizations telling how they think college football teams will fare.

Rather than just post their predictions I thought I would compare them to mine and dig up their 2008 results and apply an objective grade¹.

Sporting News
	Correlation	2008 Grade
East	75	61
West	89	96
Overall	82	79

Ill start by comparing sporting news 2009 picks to the MS picks published last month along with a correlation score I'll explain below:

Sporting News (2009)

West	East
Western Michigan	Buffalo
Central Michigan	Bowling Green
Northern Illinois	Temple
Ball State	Ohio
Toledo	Miami
Eastern Michigan	Akron
	Kent

MAC-Smack (2009)

West	East
Central Michigan	Temple
Western Michigan	Buffalo
Northern Illinois	Bowling Green
Ball State	Akron
Toledo	Ohio
Eastern Michigan	Miami
	Kent

On the West MS and Sporting news have nearly identical outcomes for the 2009 season Agreeing on the placements of all but Central and Western Michigan. October 17th is the big difference as I have CMU beating Western and I have to assume sporting news sees that game going the Bronco's way. In east there is far more discrepancy, I'm going to assume that this will be seen with other publications as their is so much parity. The only two teams not really in the running are Miami and Kent, and even one of them winning the division would not be Earth Shattering.

So how did sporting news do in 2008? not too shabby in the west but like many Miami and parity burned them in the east.

Sporting News 2008

West	East
Ball State	Miami
Central Michigan	Temple
Western Michigan	Bowling Green
Toledo	Buffalo
Northern Illinois	Ohio
Eastern Michigan	Akron
	Kent

Mid American Conference 2008

West	East
Ball State	Buffalo
Central Michigan	Bowling Green
Western Michigan	Temple
Northern Illinois	Akron
Toledo	Ohio
Eastern Michigan	Kent
	Miami

In the west NIU surprised allot of people last year and Toledo fell way short of expectations but other than that sporting news nailed the division getting a Mac-Smack prediction score of 95, in the east they did pretty poorly (even beyond Miami they were way off on Buffalo and Akron) getting a 67.

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The Criteria for grades is as follows: Correspondence Score:

• Penalty Points: For every spot off a team is between predictions a single point is taken off (Example: SN picked Central to win the West, I picked them second so that's minus one per team, or I picked Temple to win the East and SN pick them to finish third that would be minus two).
• Total Points: The total points is the maximum number of penalty points for a division, for the 6 team west that is 18 points and for the 7 team east that is 24 points.
  
• Score: The penalty points are taken from the total points (18 for the west, 24 for the east) and then a simple percentage is calculated. For the west there were two penalty points (one for CMU and one for WMU) so that's 16 points out of a possible 18 or 88.5%

Mac-Smack Prediction Grade:

• Predict the Conference Champ: 10 points, if your predicted champ finishes second, 5 points.
• Predict the Worst Team in the conference 6 points, if your predicted worst finisher places second to last, 3 points.
• For each team in the west if you predict correctly their place 14 points, if you are one place off 12 points, two places off 9 points, three places off 5 points, four places off 1 point. For each team in the east correctly guessing will get you 12, one place off 11, two places off 8 three places off 5 four places off 2, five places off 1.