[BCS Bits is a public release by BCS Administrator Bill Hancock]

With the first BCS Standings of the season to be released Sunday, October 18, this week's question is:  "How are those Standings compiled?"  It’s simple: three elements are averaged. They’re weighted equally.

1. The Harris Intercollegiate Football Poll (114 panelists),
2. The USA Today Coaches' Poll (59 panelists) and,
3. The average of six computer rankings (the highest ranking and lowest ranking for each team are discarded)

Here are the names of the computer rankings providers:

• Jeff Anderson and Chris Hester (12^th year as part of the BCS Standings)
• Richard Billingsley (11^th)
• Wes Colley (9^th)
• Ken Massey (11^th)
• Jeff Sagarin (12^th)
• Peter Wolfe (9^th)

The National Football Foundation compiles and releases the Standings each week, and Fox Sports televises the announcement.  Here is the complete schedule of the Standings announcements: (all times are Eastern)

• October 18 - Between 4 and 4:30 p.m. (after Fox's early NFL game)
• October 25 - 7:15-8 p.m. (during Fox's OT show)
• November 1 - 7:15-8 p.m. (during the OT show)
• November 8 - 4-4:30 (after early NFL game)
• November 15 - 7:15-8 p.m. (during the OT show)
• November 22 - 4-4:30 p.m. (after early NFL game)
• November 29 - 7:15-8 p.m. (during the OT show)
• December 6 - 8 p.m.

Thanks for listening.

[Commentary after the jump]

The only thing left out of the desription that would be required to produce an equivalent ranking is that the polls use the raw scores and the computer average treats each computer ranking as a ballot. To get the exact scores these need to be scaled such that the maximum and minimum possible are set to 1 and 0.

The results are published to 4 decimal places.  Teams can have a difference as small as 0.000001.  A difference of one spot in one computer would cause a difference of 0.0033 in the standings.  Estimating the variance based on a sample of random ballots with the typical variance at the #2 and #3 spots found at Massey's College Football Ranking Comparison would create a standard deviation near 0.005.  This suggests that only the first 2 digits are significant.

Until the final week most of the data becomes available for those wishing to get an early flavor of what they will look like.  On December 6th only a few of the sources will be released prior to the release of the final BCS standings.

This will also be the first year a regular season game is scheduled after the BCS selections, the Army Navy game on December 12th.

I will not be able to provide timely updates of the BCS rankings when they come out.  They should appear automatically in the rankings widget in the sidebar.  BCS Guru provides very accurate forecasts of the BCS rankings Saturday nights.  I will focus on providing an analysis of the rankings on Monday evenings.