Sports computer rankings guru Jeff Sagarin is 77 and still trying to perfect his system for evaluating college football teams even though he knows it's impossible. If he thinks he's getting close, he reminds himself of when he was growing up in New Rochelle, New York, and believed he had cracked the code.

With pencil and paper, he ranked teams based on their points for and against and used his rudimentary formula to come up with his weekly entry in a local newspaper's pick-the-winners contest. He recalls Nov. 18, 1961, as the Saturday he got his reality check: He hit on 13 of 15 games only to find out a grandmother in Brooklyn had won by making picks based on team uniform colors. “I threw my hands up in despair,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. Sagarin told the anecdote

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