This was fun.  An actual "professional" sports writer badgered me about
my pre-season rankings.  I guess he had every right to his opinion, but
the season definitely proved Entropy gloriously right!


--begin email--

From xxxxxxxxxxx@ragingbull.com Thu Jul 13 14:10 PDT 2000
Date: 13 Jul 2000 14:10:43 -0700
Subject: question about rankings

where were you raised to have colorado 48th, tcu in the top 10 and
east carolina in the top 15 of your top 25 poll, uzbekistan?  only
someone from a brake-off russian republic could have such a ludicrous
ranking system!  not one single poll has colorado ranked lower than
22; one has them as high as 7.  no other poll i have seen has east
carolina in the top 35, lou holtz can't help them, they got extremely
lucky against texas in texas' worst game of the year in '99.  i would
like to propose a little wager if you have any confidence at all in
your own ranking system.  20 bucks if colorado finishes above #20,
and 20 bucks if east carolina ends up in the top 20.  if you don't
like to wager money and are interested in this little bet and would
like to wager something else, email me back, unless you are russian
and can't understand a word i have written.  i hate to break this
to you but a mathematical rating system just doesn't work unless you
incorporate subjective anaylses of teams, which jeff sagarin made
famous but which so many wannabes have tried to clone.  i would
recommend computer geeks not trying to rate something so capricious
as college football just by using stats and numbers.

Xxxx Xxxxxxx
Staff Writer, The Dallas Morning News
214-89x-xxxx
xxxxxxxxxxx@ragingbull.com

--end email--


At the end of the 2000 season:

Colorado: 3-8
  ranked #54 by Sagarin
  ranked #43 by Entropy

TCU: 10-2
  ranked #21 by the AP poll
  ranked #12 by Sagarin
  ranked #19 by Entropy

East Carolina: 8-4
  ranked #46 by Sagarin
  ranked #36 by Entropy