Who's number one?

Regardless of how you might feel about computer rankings, there's something to keep in mind when examining them. The people that come up with the models are trying to create them to be accurate. They have nothing to gain by creating a faulty model. They use some sort of input data for each team and relate it to the same type of data for every other team. Because there is some out of conference play the models can "connect" the results from those games to results of other games. Unfortunately, like the neighborhood foot race, the sample size isn't big enough for the connectedness to too meaningful. And then there's the issue of the BCS' dumb rules about not using computer rankings that have margin of victory in their model. But there's a lot of computer rankings out there that aren't constrained by those rules and it's worth looking at them.

There's a handy dandy comparison of 53 different computer rankings here.

The Gators are ranked number 1 in all but 12 of those rankings. Of those 12, the Gators took the second spot in 10. The Gators are ranked third in one and fourth in one.

The Utes took the top spot in 7 computer rankings. USC was ranked first by three of the computers. Texas was the best team according to one lonely computer. Despite their two losses Oklahoma was ranked number one by one computer.

In the computer rankings used for the BCS, the Gators were ranked second in Wolfe and Sagarin (ELO). Both had Utah number one.

When aggregated, the 53 different computer rankings give us this top five:

1. Florida
2. USC
3. Texas
4. Oklahoma
5. Utah