October 30, 1998

Well, another weekend of college football is over and another weekend of Corso proving why I belong on ESPN Game Day is also over. Chris always calls me on Saturday nights (kind of like how I call my mom) and then he lets me get in my 2 cents worth, but I still don't get to go to NYC and spend the day with the boys. Maybe I could help find the Pony.

Most of the games on TV weren't worth mentioning. We had Wisconsin beating Iowa, Florida State beating Georgia Tech and Notre Dame beating Army. It was a great day for the cadets. The leaves were turning and ND was able to fill the stands to watch another classic ND vs. Army game.

I remember back to the old days of WWII when these two would square off with the best collection of draft dodgers they could assemble. Well, this year was no different as both teams proved why they can recruit with the best of them. And again, it came down to almost the last play of the game. It's too bad that ND and Army have to call this series after so many years. It has really been getting good lately. But that's what happens when you join a conference. You can't play all the teams you want to play. Hopefully ND will be able to find another service academy, like the Citadel, to fill Army's spot on their schedule.

The big news of last weekend was actually on Monday when the BSC Standings were announced. Now, I don't pretend to be a math genius, but I do know that higher scores are better than lower scores. So why is UCLA ranked ahead of OSU when OSU has more points?? And KCSU, which really surprised me, is only at 5th!!! Either the boys can't add or they are purposely trying to make the Rose Bowl the Championship Game this year. After so many close calls over the past few years, I can see why the Granddaddy of them all would want to set-up a great contest.

Now, for all you fans who think that this BSC System is something new, I have to fill you in on the Von Neumann Ratings from the 1930's. John Von Neumann was a mathematician at Princeton who was also a great football fan. However, he was tired of seeing a bunch of beat writers determining who the National Champ was. So he created his own Rating System - the Von Neumann Ratings. He carefully analyzed a team's record, their opponents' records and margin of victory. He penalized teams for winning by too much as he wanted to promote good sportsmanship.

Von Neumann started out doing his ratings on an abacus. This worked pretty well at first, but after a while there were so many teams and so much data for him to enter. Pretty soon he had to hire half the grad students from Peking State University to run the abacuses and come up with the numbers.

Von Neumann knew there had to be a better way than wasting all these brilliant grad students on their abacuses, doing thousands of multiplications. At first he thought he should simplify his system to just take into account the results of games, he struck out in a different direction, put together a bunch of radio tubes, and designed the world's first computer.

Yes, it's true. Von Neumann's invention of the computer was not for calculations leading to the atomic bomb, though that was one of the side effects. Actually Von Neumann built the computer to do his football rankings and he hired then-young economist Milton Friedman away from his graduate studies.

The computer made things simpler. He was able to multiply numbers reflecting the average weight of the offensive line, tire running time (most of the players could outrun a tire even when it went downhill), number of players on the team with GPAs under 3.0 (the more the better), amount of food eaten at training table that week, etc.

The first year the computer ratings were used was 1938. Von Neumann's ratings were to come out right after Thanksgiving. The entire college football world breathlessly awaited the results, for this was to be the first truly scientific rating.

Many were quite surprised when the Von Neumann 1938 national champions turned out to be the Maroons of the University of Chicago, especially since they lost every game by at least 50 points and had already announced plans to drop football at the end of the season.

It turned out that Friedman, a loyal Maroon student and fan, had found a beetle climbing around inside the computer and didn't do anything when the beetle shorted out one of the tubes, which led to the incorrect result.

Yes, the University of Chicago was named the 1938 Von Neumann computer system national champions thanks to the first computer "bug".