Football rankings: A forecast for economists' productivity

A recent issue of this Journal contained an interesting verification by Shughart, Tollison, and Goff ["Pigskins and Publications," Atlantic Economic Journal, 14, July 1986, pp. 46-50] of the importance of university football teams to academia. Specifically, these authors claim that the productivity or publications of an economics faculty decline when their university's football team is having a winning season. They conclude that the opportunity costs for economists are higher when their football team is winning because they postpone their research in order to follow the team. With tongue in cheek, the authors clearly recognize the joy of having a winning team. This comment adds a forecasting measure, based on the college football season rankings by the Associated Press (AP) for the years 1965-85, for economists who are planning how to spend their fall semester or trying to determine whether their productivity will be high or low. The highest opportunity costs would be for faculty at the university whose football team is designated as No. 1 in the preseason ranking or becomes during the season a viable candidate for No. 1 in the postseason ranking. Therefore, it is important for economists to know how much confidence they can place in the AP forecasts as a predictor of postseason rankings. Note first that Alabama, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, and Southern California were selected by the AP as postseason No. 1 teams over 60 percent of the time between 1965 and 1985. Therefore, faculty members at these schools have a high chance of being faced with the ultimate opportunity cost of having a postseason No. 1 team. But even for these schools, knowledge of the preseason rankings does not necessarily indicate the extent of opportunity costs the faculty will face during the season. It is true that these same schools were selected as preseason No. 1 over 60 percent of the time, but not necessarily in the same year that they were given a postseason No. 1 rank. In fact, the team with the preseason No. 1 rank is seldom the team with the postseason No. 1 rank. In only four of these 21 years (19 percent) did the same team have a No. 1 for both preseason and postseason rankings. For those teams given an AP preseason rank of No. 1 during this period, the 95 percent confidence interval estimate of the postseason rank is between 3 and 8. This means that 5 percent of preseason No. 1 teams can expect to have a postseason rank of either 9 or greater, or 2 or less. The same analysis of teams with an AP postseason rank of No. 1 reveals a similar conclusion. The 95 percent conf idence in terval es t imate of preseason rank is between 4 and 11 for those teams given a postseason rank of No. 1. Therefore, 5 percent of postseason No. 1 teams can expect to have a preseason rank of either 12 or more, or 3 or less. Further, 14 percent of these teams were not even among the top 20 in preseason ranks. A n o t h e r ques t ion of interest is how reliable is the preseason rank in predicting team record for the season. For these years, there is significant negative (P < .10) correlation between preseason rank and team record for those teams receiving the coveted postseason No. 1 rank. This means that the worse the preseason rank, the better the team record during the season. Perhaps a low preseason rank simultaneously spurs the team on to gridiron victories and encourages economists to spend a productive season on research and publications, leading to promotion and tenure victories.