Experience Adds Up in Sagarin’s System

Jeff Sagarin, the man who introduced “cube root,” “geometric mean” and “logarithmic function” to the everyday discourse in college football, sits in his office in Bloomington, Ind., and ponders his newfound status as one of the most powerful men in the sport.

“It’s strange,” says Sagarin, 50, a 1970 graduate of MIT, “because I’m the same person I’ve always been. . . . Part of me gets an ego boost. But the other part of me says, ‘Somehow, this is not right.’

“I’d hate to see somebody decimaled out at the 1-2 level. If Kansas State, Tennessee and UCLA are all undefeated and one of them gets decimaled out, that’s sort of sad. And somebody’s going to be real unhappy.”

A lifelong sports junkie who wistfully reminisces about his basketball playing days in Boston area city leagues in the 1970s--”I could go to the hole then”--Sagarin devised his mathematical method of ranking teams shortly after his graduation from MIT primarily for his amusement.

“I didn’t start devising my system when I was a kid, knowing in advance it was going to be used by other people for a tournament,” he says. “I just did it to satisfy my own sense of who the best teams are.”

But after his “power ratings” were published, first by the Boston Globe in 1974 and later by USA Today, Sagarin became an influential figure in college athletics. His college basketball rankings are used by the NCAA selection committee to help seed the annual postseason tournament and now, by his inclusion in the bowl championship series equation, his football rankings will help determine which teams play in the BCS title game.

“I get more e-mails now,” Sagarin says. “It’s interesting. I’ve gotten e-mails from professors and no matter how intelligent the person is, it’s funny how football brings out an interesting side of the brain.

“I get e-mails from professors and their method of proof is, ‘You’re a complete . . . , Sagarin, it’s self-evident that Tennessee is better than Kansas State. . . . off.’

“I say, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting logic. You consider going back to high school and trying that in geometry class?’ I did that to this one professor and he got so ticked off--’How dare you attack me personally!’ ”

Sagarin laughs.

“Professors love to dish it out, but they don’t like to take it,” he says.

Sagarin is also amused--to a point--by the teeming masses of computer jockeys claiming to have discovered the best system yet to rate and contrast football teams.

“I guess a part of me envies these guys with the Seattle Times,” he says, referring to Jeff Anderson and Chris Hester. “They are 28, 29 years old, from what I gather.

“I’ve been doing this since 1972, when those guys were, what, in kindergarten? They were born around 1970. They weren’t even in kindergarten when I was doing this for a living. And neither one of these guys has any math background. [Anderson majored in economics and political science at the University of Washington, Hester in English.]

“To be honest, I don’t think anybody knows as much as I do about how to do this. You can check it out. I really did graduate from MIT in June 1970 with a degree in math. I had a B-plus average--a 4.3 out of 5. . . .

“I’m sure everybody in this does as good a job as they can. I just don’t think anybody has invested the mathematical knowledge that I have in it. That’s not a mean statement. That’s a statement of what I think is true.”

Sagarin has Kansas State No. 1 in his index and admits he’d like to see the Wildcats prove him right in the Fiesta Bowl.

“At this point, I’m sort of, in a sense, neutral,” he says. “I just root for my numbers, whatever they are. But I’d like to see Kansas State win it all. There’s a whole bunch of people who delight in e-mailing me--’K-State can’t play.’

“I’d like to see them win. And these people will still be upset at that point--’It’s an outrage, they got lucky and it doesn’t count.’ Once these people make their minds up, they don’t let up.”

Worse yet, from a mathematician’s standpoint, as these people rant on and on, their arguments become . . . illogical.

“God forbid they ever retroactively ran the Manhattan Project,” Sagarin muses. “We’d all be speaking German and Japanese now.”