As we inch closer to the unveiling of the official BCS rankings, it seems like a good time to scrutinize some of the computer ratings that go into the BCS.

The first one that jumps out, as noted by CollegeBCS.com, is that Northwestern is either the No. 2 team in the country or the No. 52 team in the country, depending on which computer rating you believe.

The Sagarin ratings list Northwestern second, behind only Alabama. Keep in mind when you look at the Sagarin ratings that Jeff Sagarin does three different ratings, which he calls the Rating, the Elo-Chess and the Predictor. Sagarin himself actually considers Elo-Chess to be the least accurate of the three, but the NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, chose to use his Elo-Chess ratings because it believes that the other two ratings (which incorporate margin of victory) encourage teams to run up the score.

The Billingsley ratings list Northwestern 52nd. Billingsley isn’t at all impressed with Northwestern’s undefeated start, because Billingsley places a premium on beating good teams, something Northwestern hasn’t done.

For the most part, these things will get sorted out as the season goes on and the computers have more data to crunch, and by the time the BCS rankings actually mean something, at the end of the season, we shouldn’t have any instances of one team being slotted 50 places apart in two different computer rankins. But for now, those BCS computers sure do yield some strange results.