By MARK ALESIA
The Indianapolis Star

On his way to last Saturday's Georgia-Florida game, Wes Colley happily ran over a stuffed Gator planted by a Georgia fan. During five hours of tailgating, he ate chicken, drank beer and threw a football around.

His wife was there, decked out in Florida attire. So was his brother, who started as an offensive tackle for Georgia in the late 1980s.

But as the creator of one of the seven computer ranking systems used by the Bowl Championship Series, Colley was hardly a normal fan. And clearly not the stereotype of a BCS computer guy.

"I get letters that say, 'Hey, Colley, why don't you get out of the basement and stop playing Quake and Dungeons & Dragons, and watch a football game?"' said Colley, 31, who has a doctorate in astrophysics from Princeton and teaches at Virginia.

He is one of the people who routinely hear themselves dismissed on television and sports radio as anonymous nerds and much worse in e-mail from angry fans. Through no fault of their own, the people behind the computers are seen as remote and mysterious, in part because of a tone set by former BCS czar Roy Kramer. Kramer insisted that these purveyors of the numbers that move college football do nothing that might suggest that they actually enjoy the games and might have some allegiances.

The computers are one of main four factors in the final BCS rankings, which makes them fair game for criticism. But the people making the ratings aren't paid, and don't even get a trip to a game. Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, the current BCS czar, said he has never met any of them in person.

"All of this is done not even on a handshake," said Peter Wolfe, 48, a doctor in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose system is used by the BCS.

Wolfe also teaches at UCLA, specializing in infectious diseases. Of his friends and family, he said, "They're as surprised as I am that I have anything to do with this."

But Wolfe and the others are devoted to the job, highly educated, and fiercely protective of the integrity of what they're doing. That's the case even though Colley is the only one to make his complete formula available to the public.

"The truth is, I am biased toward Georgia and Virginia, but that doesn't affect a computer algorithm," Colley said.

Don't get some of these guys started on the science behind what they're doing. Colley's formula, available online, is incomprehensible to just about anyone without a degree in astrophysics.

So fans become enraged when they believe that the computers defy common sense.

"It can get pretty rough and nasty," said Richard Billingsley, 51, from Hugo, Okla. "My first year with the BCS, I got some awful, awful e-mails. Nasty. Last year, Brigham Young fans sent all the e-mails. But it was so different because they weren't vulgar. They all said they were disappointed BYU wasn't ranked higher, but they never used profanity. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that. I answered a lot of those e-mails.

"I had one threat. There was a guy from Florida who sent me something that said if he could track me down, he'd beat my face."

Billingsley attracted the NCAA's attention in the mid-1990s when he analyzed every score in the history of college football dating to 1869. The NCAA published his work and remembered him when the BCS said it needed computer guys.

Billingsley has been making ratings since he was 16 and working with an Olivetti hand-cranked calculator. He is not a computer programmer or a mathematician. His rankings lean on the instincts of a fan, giving extra weight to head-to-head games.

"This was always my dream," Billingsley said. "As a kid, 16 years old, I felt like one day I would have an impact on college football. I wasn't a football player. I was 5-7, 90 pounds. I couldn't have been the water boy. But I knew 30 years ago that the AP (poll) was not the way to name a national champion."

Kramer, then commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, introduced computers as an official part of college football in 1998. The idea was to settle disagreements in the coaches' and media polls and assure a No. 1 vs. No. 2 national championship game. That allowed the BCS to collect big television money, avoid a playoff that school presidents didn't want and at least give fans something they could view as the national championship game.

Indiana connection

Kramer met with Jeff Sagarin of Bloomington, Ind., the gold standard in the computer sports rankings world because he makes a living doing it. Since 1985, Sagarin's work has been published in USA TODAY.

After the 1994 season, when Penn State went undefeated but Nebraska was the consensus national champion in the polls, Sagarin received a letter from Penn State coach Joe Paterno. He signed it, "Thanks, Joe," on a printout of Sagarin's final computer rankings that had the Nittany Lions No. 1.

Sagarin, 54, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, and Kramer became friends.

"Kramer taught math and was a high school football coach," Sagarin said. "Nothing gets by him. He understood everything I was throwing at him. He's a unique guy, the last of an era. The guys running the other (BCS) conferences, they're more of this era. They're good at press conferences."

The BCS has found other candidates for its rankings on the Internet, where there is a thriving subculture of computer sports ranking enthusiasts.

Generally, the BCS contacted the computer people out of the blue, asked them to supply their rankings from previous seasons and to offer some assurance that they were objective. The New York Times computer is the only one without the name of a person attached.

"I don't know who created that formula," said Jerry Palm of Schererville, Ind., widely recognized as the top expert on the BCS. "The New York Times is total mystery meat to me. At least you can get a hold of Richard Billingsley. At the New York Times, you don't even know."

Marjorie Connelly, an editor in the paper's news surveys department, supervises the paper's computer rankings. She said a consultant changed a small amount of code to comply with the BCS mandate that margin of victory be eliminated. The original program, she said, was created in 1979 in a collaborative effort that included at least one person who has since died.

But the rankings have the imprimatur of the nation's most powerful newspaper, which seems to suit the BCS just fine.

"They're treating this like the biggest news story of the year," Tranghese said. "It probably helps college football in New York City."

Operating instructions

The other people behind the BCS computers receive few rules: Don't make predictions, don't make statements about what could happen under different scenarios.

They e-mail their rankings to the Big East office, the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind., and to SEC Associate Commissioner Charles Bloom, who helped set up the system with Kramer.

There's a built-in safeguard in that the BCS drops the lowest computer ranking for each team. But the bottom line is that most of the formulas are not public.

"There is a leap of faith that they're applying the formula correctly," Palm said.

Tranghese mentioned Palm specifically as someone who would find any problems.

"We don't take seven polls each and every week and analyze them," Tranghese said. "But if something is dramatically different, we notice."

Palm doesn't know the individual formulas, but makes his BCS projections based on "behavior - studying them and seeing how they move." Palm said he does catch rare data entry errors.

"He wrote me an e-mail and said I was missing the Alabama game (result)," Colley said. "I used CBS SportsLine as my data source and Alabama didn't show up for some reason. He told me to switch to Yahoo and everything has been fine."

Jeff Anderson, 33, a political science professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, said he and the co-creator of his BCS system, Chris Hester, a Seattle radio sportscaster, check each other.

"You have to get your scores somewhere, and they're not always right," Anderson said. "The L.A. Times had a score reversed. I was using that paper. Chris was using something else. So we caught it."

It isn't all aggravation for these guys, though.

Kenneth Massey, 26, a doctoral student in math at Virginia Tech and creator of a BCS system, did an interview during a game on ESPN.

"I didn't care for the interview because I'm camera shy, but I did like watching the game from the sideline," Massey said.

Perhaps surprisingly, Massey advocates a system where computers would be used only to break ties between the media and coaches polls. He would also like to see the BCS employ just one computer, with the formula made public.

"If you're going to use a computer, it should be something people can duplicate and plug in hypothetical results," Massey said. "It would help athletic directors with schedule strength. It would ease criticism, too. It seems so mysterious now. Coaches feel they have no control. They can't figure it out. It seems random."

But the BCS has a contract with ABC through the 2005 season, which means things are unlikely to change much.

Wolfe summed it up best.

"Math and college football is an uneasy coexistence," he said.