COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Box 208281
New Haven, CT 06520-8281

COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 1381

College Football Rankings and Market Efficiency

Ray C. Fair and John F. Oster

September 2002
Revised March 2005

The results in this paper show that various college football ranking systems have useful independent information for predicting the outcomes of games. Optimal weights for the systems are estimated, and the use of these weights produces a predictive system that is more accurate than any of the individual systems. The results also provide a fairly precise estimate of the size of the home field advantage. These results may be of interest to the Bowl Championship Series in choosing which teams to play in the national championship game. The results also show, however, that none of the systems, including the optimal combination, contains any useful information that is not in the final Las Vegas point spread. It is argued in the paper that this is a fairly strong test of the efficiency of the college football betting market.

JEL Classification: C52

Keywords: Football rankings, Predictive information

Old title: Comparing the Predictive Information Content of College Football Rankings