National Experts proclaim 2001 Miami football best of last 21 years

The vast majority of College Football Experts on social media, specifically Twitter disagreed with the selections of Texas and especially Florida being ahead of the 2001 Miami football team. Even some Florida fans gave the Hurricanes credit.

The outrage over the Hurricanes finishing third ranged from ESPN’s own writers who cover college football to Shannon Sharpe on Fox’s undisputed.

Sharpe who played football for Miami’s 2018 week two opponent Savannah State went on a two-minute tirade on why the 2001 Miami Football team is nearly the undisputed greatest team over the last 21 seasons and likely the best in the history of college football. Sharpe said, “It’s the Hurricanes and it’s not even close.”

There were a plethora of good tweets from around the country disputing the findings. Sharpe completely tore down the selections on his own. While everyone wants to blame ESPN, its more because of a faulty formula than any bias ESPN has for or against a specific team.

The ESPN formula was explained when they published the article that ranked the 21 teams beginning with the first year of the BCS in 1998 through last season’s championship won by Alabama.

"” ESPN Analytics calculated overall, offensive and defensive ratings to find the true strength of a champion through a comparison of top college football programs across seasons. The model includes a giant network of all FBS college football teams that played approximately 15,000 games over 20 years and assigns each team to a game, score and home-field advantage indicator within each season. The network establishes a team’s strength interrelated with every other team in the network and returns a rating measured in points above the average team (zero rating).”"

The network/formula probably assigned too much weight to a team’s schedule. You can only play the teams you are scheduled for each week or season.