College Football Rankings and Market Efficiency

Ray Fair () and John F. Oster
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John F. Oster: Choate Rosemary Hall

No 1381, Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers from Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University

Abstract: The results in this paper show that various college football ranking systems have useful independent information for predicting the outcomes of games. Optimal weights for the systems are estimated, and the use of these weights produces a predictive system that is more accurate than any of the individual systems. The results also provide a fairly precise estimate of the size of the home field advantage. These results may be of interest to the Bowl Championship Series in choosing which teams to play in the national championship game. The results also show, however, that none of the systems, including the optimal combination, contains any useful information that is not in the final Las Vegas point spread. It is argued in the paper that this is a fairly strong test of the efficiency of the college football betting market.

Keywords: Football rankings; Predictive information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2002-09, Revised 2005-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Sports Economics, February 2007, 3-18

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