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…
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…
When I first saw the NYT 4th-Down Bot last year my reaction was, now maybe we’ll make progress. Successful analytics is about far more than whether or not your numbers are right. It’s an exercise in persuasion. I figured the bot could only help. New angle, new platform. But if the past is any guide,…
A quick look at teams’ strength-of-schedule this season. Below we’ve simply averaged the end-of-season MP rating for each team’s 16 opponents. Playoff teams are highlighted in red. A few observations: Most playoff teams come from the easier half of the distribution. While tempting to believe that is because of the easier schedule, these scheduling differences can’t explain…
For the first time since we started this work we’re going to use priors in our rankings. We were driven to this because we wanted to make week-1 predictions, but we’re also hopeful it will boost our performance early in the season. We are doing this in the most simple, light-handed, and in some ways obviously…