Every year, as conference championship week got close, I'd find myself reading conference tiebreaker rules. Not skimming. Reading, the way you read furniture instructions, because I needed the answer to the question with real stakes in my house: who do we need to win, and lose, so our team can make it to the natty? Our team meant Oregon, and the answer was almost never just Oregon. If you've ever loved a team with something on the line in November, you know about the second season: there's the one your team plays, and there's the one happening on every other field, where teams you'll never care about decide things you care about completely.
Rankings get all the ink in this sport. But the rankings were never the question. The question, every single Saturday, was: what am I rooting for so my team moves up?
How I got this way
I'm a University of Oregon alum. My senior year was the Joey Harrington season: the #2 finish, the Heisman-finalist campaign complete with a billboard in Times Square. I was in Autzen for the USC Halloween Fright Night, the night our two programs flipped fortunes, at least the way I tell it. And I was there for the many times Stanford ruined our season, when we'd find ourselves needing to root for chaos to get back in the hunt. All of it made me a die-hard Duck.
The homework
In the years Oregon was in the hunt for a natty, the question was always what we needed to go our way beyond our game: what got us into the playoff, or got us the better seed. I worked it out mostly in my head, spending more time than I care to admit looking at rankings and upcoming games.
Then I'd share it, talk or text, with friends and family: here's what I learned, here's who we're pulling for this weekend. The person I talked with most was my Dad. Every week, the same conversation: what we wanted to see that weekend for Oregon to move up in the rankings. He just passed away this past May. In some ways, this site gives me an outlet for what I used to love talking with him about.
Half the fun was the group-text debates that never resolved. Say you just beat a team you don't usually like. Do you root for them the rest of the way, to improve the quality of your win? Or do you root against them because you don't like the team, ahem Washington?
The build
I wanted to build this site last summer, and I got it started, but didn't finish. This year I finished.
Fan Watch runs 50,000 simulations of the rest of the season every week, with the real conference tiebreakers (including the weird ones) and the real 12-team playoff format, and turns all of that into a rooting guide: who do we root for this week, and why. Before I trusted it, I tested the wiring: I fed it the last two seasons, results in hand, and it re-derived all 18 conference championship matchups and all 24 playoff teams. That proves the tiebreakers and the selection rules are right, not that it sees the future. The receipts, and the places it still gets things wrong, are written up here.
This site is a culmination of decades of thinking about what to root for, written down as software.
This fall
The second season starts right up again in August. The difference is the homework's already done: the tiebreakers are in the machine, and the guide says root for this, here's why, in words you can read during a commercial break.
The group text is still on me.