Mr. James should know, then, that stat.an. in baseball is far, far easier than it is in football.

For starters, the sports are night-and-day different. Baseball players compete against situations that the other team has created. In football, the players are competing against one another. All 22 players on the field can impact every single snap. The vast majority of at bats involve a max of 4 players. These differences lead to statistics that correlate much more strongly to wins and losses.

Second, consider the sheer number of games played in a baseball season. This, alone, makes the analysis easier. If we played 100 games in college football it could basically be a national round-robin.

Finally, for all of the crowing about the computers, it’s typically not because it diverges from the polls, but because it diverges from reality. You end up with predictions that just don’t make a lot of sense.

Instead of boycotting the league, what Mr. James needs to do is himself come up with a wonderful, predictive analysis package. If he came up with a system that accurately predicted the outcome of even 75% of bowl games for a few years in a row, you can bet that system would get added to the BCS.