Jeff Sagarin: The Most Powerful Man In Sports

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at Internationaled.org

Published: October 15, 2010

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The Most Powerful Man in Sports

The most powerful man in sport toils alone in a dark room on a leafy street in Bloomington, Indiana.

He’s not a player, owner or a league commissioner. He’s Jeff Sagarin, an M.I.T. grad, math geek, whose rating systems determine where your teams end up in the big dance or which bowl they play in or what seeding they might get in lacrosse, hockey, volleyball or golf.

Clients, like USA Today, college and pro leagues and sometimes a few teams, pay Jeff for his calculations. He does these permutations extremely fast. To give you an idea, his rankings of golfers for GolfWeek magazine takes him four minutes a week.

The most powerful man in sports does all his work before breakfast, unshaven, in a ratty T-shirt and holey underwear. This was not the dress codes taught at the MIT algorithms class where most of the students expected to be working at insurance companies.

The most powerful man in sports reads a few e-mails (usually vitriolic tirades berating him for ranking certain teams too low) then buttons up his work day before heading off to 7:00 am breakfast.  

Here’s what you don’t know. You probably think the most powerful man in sports owns some type of Kray or Univac supercomputer to do all his intricate calculations. No. He does it on a TRS-80 or something just as primitive.

He does his programming in Fortran. In Fortran, folks. That’s like Wolfgang Puck cooking with an Easy-Bake-Oven.

The most powerful man in sports can tell you that Charleston Southern is ranked 327th in the country, played the 203rd toughest schedule and has a Sagarin rating of 57.86.

The most powerful man in sports doesn’t play favorites. He puts in the facts and let’s the computer do all the ratings. His secret formulas have taken emotion out of the equation. The most powerful man in sports spends his day playing g...
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Golf

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