This Is Not A Joke
Massey's BCS rankings of all football playing schools have Pittsburgh No. 1. USC is No. 17.
Using Massey's BCS formula, and applying it to all colleges playing football, USC ranks behind No. 16 Otterbein, a Division III school. If the non-Division 1-A schools are taken out, USC ranks No. 12.
In Massey's Division 1-A BCS rankings, Florida ranks 103rd.
Huh? Did Massey ride the short bus to school?
I don't know why we look at computer rankings or even have the humans rank these teams this early though. It's still WAY too early to tell how good some of these teams really are.
And by doing the rankings this early, you get situations where Team A can lose by 10 points at home to Team B, have a worse record than Team B, and still be ranked 9 spots ahead of Team B. (Oklahoma St. & Houston)
Massey admits that his formula isn't remotely accurate until all teams are linked (there are "degrees of separation" between any two teams in the list), as he doesn't seed his system with last year's data (as Sagarin does). This doesn't happen until Week 5, so right now, the data is strictly a curiosity. (By the way, Sagarin does run the results from scratch at Week 5, so last year's data doesn't affect this year's final results.)