Finding the Perfect Fit for College Football Championships: ‘Cinderella’s Slipper’

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Chattanooga, TN, December 17, 2009 — In recent years, there has been a growing debate in the world of college football among fans, coaches and sports journalists regarding the best way to determine the National Champion. “Cinderella’s Slipper” (published by iUniverse) by author and IT professional Mike Nemeth, examines the inherent flaws in the current system and presents a unique solution to the question.

Today the test for a college football champion is to be ranked 1st or 2nd in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) standings and then to win a single bowl game staged by an affiliation of bowl organizers and conference commissioners. However, fans don’t trust the BCS to select the two best teams to play for the title. Coaches don’t understand the method of ranking teams in the standings. Congress holds hearings to investigate the BCS and threatens legislation to fix the BCS and even the new President has called for change in the system.

In “Cinderella’s Slipper” the author examines the problem from a different perspective, the perspective of an Information Technology professional tasked with a business problem to automate – rationally and accurately discriminating among similar or identical won/lost records. As such, Nemeth followed the classic pattern to automate the ranking of college football teams. Essentially this meant forgetting everything he thought he knew about football and rigorously analyzing the problem from the top-down as though it was a completely new field of endeavor. “Cinderella’s Slipper” recounts the development process with astonishing revelations about what truly makes a team “good” and what differentiates good teams from average or poor teams.

In part, “Cinderella’s Slipper” is a journey of discovery about a game that is not well understood even by the so-called experts who are directly involved. It is a manifesto that dispels long-held myths that are reinforced by the media. “Cinderella’s Slipper” is also a description of the logical thought process that leads to an algorithm for accurately ranking football teams. The treatise of “Cinderella’s Slipper” is presented using real-life examples of games that prove a point or highlight a concept so it is an entertaining read for football fans. Once the algorithm is composed, it is applied to the 2007 and 2008 seasons with startling results as the author’s rankings are compared to polls and to the BCS standings. Plot twists abound as those seasons are recounted in the light of accurate ranking.

Mike Nemeth was born and raised in Wisconsin. He is a former basketball coach and entrepreneur with thirty years of experience in applying classic system development life cycles to automate business functions and processes for Fortune 500 companies. For more information on the system Nemeth devised, please go to http://www.rpgrankings.com.

iUniverse is the premier book publisher for emerging, self-published authors. For more information, please visit http://www.iuniverse.com.