Computer Rankings
October 30, 1998
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".