Quick update on our end-of-season projections, focusing on the “In The Conversation” (ITC) metric we discussed in this pre-season blog. The aim is to anticipate which 6-7 teams will the playoff debate focus on going into the conference championships. This is all based on the sim we slaved over in August, updated for what we’ve…
Here are our “grades” for the third week of the college season. We control for game location and opponent quality, and discount garbage time situations. score diff is how we’d expect the team to do against an average team on a neutral field based on the way they actually played in the game, but using only predictive metrics. pctile rating is a rating of…
Here are our “grades” for the second week of the college season. We control for game location and opponent quality, and discount garbage time situations. score diff is how we’d expect the team to do against an average team on a neutral field based on the way they actually played in the game, but using only predictive metrics. So…
Team can play well and lose, or poorly and win. In order to see beyond the score to determine how a team performed fundamentally, we score a team’s performance in each game relative to all games played in the last ten years, accounting for opponent strength. With this tool we can objectively see which wins were…
Rufus and I always enjoy the NFL post-season projections we update throughout the season. Frankly it might be our favorite product. This year we decided to put together something similar on the college side. But since the playoff committee lies beyond a humble quant’s domain, we have to approach it a little differently. Our projections…
Last week I posted picks for a bowl “confidence pool”. Those simply require ranking the bowls 1-40 in how confident you are in who the outright winner will be. You bet/get 40 points for your most confident, 39 for next, etc. Our usual rankings are fine for that and it adds some flavor to the…
Have been inspired this week to enter a bowl confidence pool. Crazy to try to predict bowls, we understand, but better our numbers than nothing, right? Well, we’ll see. We like that it’s confidence-based, and a reasonably big sample. And we like that it will add some flavor to the holidays. The usual details apply.…
So you’re forecasting the season for the top 25 teams in college football. What do you think matters more, how good a team is or what kind of schedule they play? We all know strength of schedule matters, but how much? Might differences in schedule strength contribute as much to the final standings as differences…
For yesterday’s show on Wharton Moneyball I took a look at how expectations differed between “Experts” and “Algorithms”. I.e., the coaches and writers who vote in the two main polls versus analytics-based models like ours. To do this I just took the average points in the Coaches and AP polls, and compared that to the…
Howdy and welcome to the 2015 football season. Finally. As much as we like speculation, we’re very happy to have real football and real results on the way soon. We’ve posted our pre-season rankings and will have picks before Thursday’s openers. And then of course next week we’ll fold in the NFL. Our Top 25…