The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.After the article on divisional alignments and apparently unrelated to it I read a number of media reports and blogger flotsam that suggested that the hypothesis that there is currently a larger gap between BCS and non-BCS teams than between division 1 and other divisions couldn't be determined by won-loss records because of the disparity in game location. Since that is a testable hypothesis on its own, I took a look at the data, and it turns out the assertion is incorrect.
Thomas H. Huxley
The table below summarizes the results of interdivisional games played through 28 September 2005. As you can see from the table below, 85 percent of the games between Division 2, 3 or NAIA teams against 1AA teams were hosted by the 1AA school, compared to 73 percent of the games between between non-BCS and BCS schools. Nonetheless, non-D1 teams have won 23 percent of the 65 games against 1AA teams, compared to non-BCS teams' 10 percent of 81 games versus BCS teams.
It may be unfair that the majority of games between teams from different divisions are played at the team from the higher-division's site, but if that's a major factor in finding where divisions should be divided, in 2005 there's still a bigger difference between BCS and non-BCS than D1 and non-D1.
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