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…
The season-long head-to-head matchup between the Ducks and Buckeyes has been like a great basketball game: lots of lead changes. They started the season #s 3 & 5, ended it 2 & 3, and never left the top 10 in-between. But what is most noticeable are the 9 (!) lead changes in the 17 weeks…
Bowl Game Recap: We had an undefeated bowl season, going 5-0 on our official plays and benefitted from two amazing fourth quarter comebacks. In our lone Big Play, Michigan State (+3) rallied from a 17-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat Baylor. And on Christmas Eve, Central Michigan (+3.5) came back from down 35 in the fourth quarter to lose…
Play criteria are the same as they have been all year. We do not consider situational factors, motivation, lame duck coaches, etc. Lines are based purely off our power ratings, adjusted for QB injuries and pace of play. Lines are Vegas Insider consensus as of 11:00am PST on Thursday, December 18. Big Plays (16-11-1…
We ended the “regular” season on a good note, winning our one official play (Louisiana Tech +11), and going 2-0 on our leans. Since we won’t post bowl game picks until next week, I figured I’d fill this space with a summary of our season. It’s been a very good year. Overall our record on official…
Let’s get the “I told you so” out of the way: We had Ohio State from the beginning. They were #3 in our first bracket, posted October 24, and in every bracket since. Despite the pre-season injury to QB Braxton Miller and early loss to VaTech, our numbers said they were playing like one of…
The Massey-Peabody bracket reconciles politics and analytics, drawing on good analytics while acknowledging political reality. We begin with the traditional Massey-Peabody Power Rankings, a predictive analytics model built to identify the “best” teams. We then impose a few political constraints in order to also consider which teams are “most deserving”: 1) Every team starts the…