Week 8 - A Formula Change

You may notice some of the lower rankings are a lot more similar to most of the national ratings. One of the reasons is that The Internet changed its philosophy a little bit. Here is The Internet's explanation:

The Internet still believes that two of the things people want the most when ranking teams are "quality wins" and "wins against conference." Yet one thing The Internet was failing to figure into its holistic--and frankly genius--system was that another thing that was very important to people was making sure teams were properly penalized for a "second loss."  There seems to be some forgiveness for the first loss, but the second loss is a strong black mark, no matter what the circumstances.  Therefore the rankings have been adjusted to account for that.

In truth, the rankings did not change that much.  Heck, Duke went up in the rankings.  But some weird outliers like USC and Washington State remaning in the top 3-4 despite having two losses has been corrected.  The Internet did want me to warn you that things might get weird next week, because the adjustment made to acknowledge a second loss made the gate to into the top 25 to be much wider (it also is the reason for so many ties).  For now though, thinks look fine to me.  Nice job, Intertnet.  Here are the rankings for posterity: