Mentzer Rankings take a beating in the bowls

34 Bowl Games, 33 played and 1 to go. If you used the Mentzer Rankings to predict winners this year, you probably are not happy. Tells me that I probably have some work to do on the rankings.

Currently the Rankings are 17 - 16. 17 times the team with the better ranking won the game and 16 times the team with the better ranking lost the game. That's not too good.

Of the Bowl Games that the participants were within 5 rankings of each other (i.e. Navy #37 vs Wake Forest # 41), the rankings were 8 - 5. That's not too bad for the teams that are closely matched. But that means that the rankings are 9 - 11 for the rest of the bowls where there is more than 5 positions in rankings with one game to go - Florida is ranked 10 and oklahoma is ranked 3.

I may need to go back to the drawing board or maybe this was just a very weird season.

Of the 68 teams in the bowls, the Mentzer Rankings did have the first 56 teams in a bowl game and the lowest ranked team to get into a bowl came in at number 94, the next lowest being at number 72. So the rankings are good from the standpoint of picking the best 50 teams, it's just the ordering that needs to be tweaked. Maybe next year, the rankings will do better.