Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

For those that follow my posts, it should be clear by now that I have a fascination with numbers and that this fascination takes many forms. One topic that I have been thinking about a lot lately is that of college football recruiting. This time of year various fan-bases either celebrate or mourn the fact that a 17-yr old kid just picked up a baseball hat with a specific color scheme off from a table.  Because we have no actual football to focus our emotions on, the successes or failures on the summer recruiting trail can be very intense. But, does it actually matter? How much better is a 5-star compared to a 3-star? Do some schools do a better job than others with lower ranked recruits? Should we be freaking out if our rival just picked up a 5-star? I have often thought about ways to try to quantify these things. I think that I finally figured out how. First, I needed to find a consistent measure of both the quality of high school recruits and the eventual success of those recruit

I have seen a lot of internet chatter recently this week about the over/under for MSU this year, including information that ESPN's FPI predicted MSU to win 8.8 games, which is higher than any over/under line that I have seen (usually 7.5 or 8). I have started to take a look at this and I have some quick thoughts. In brief, my math matches the FPI pretty well. I usually dog the FPI a bit, but I think ESPN has refined their model a bit and the performance has improved substantially. My only real complaint these days is that the FPI is very conservative with respect to the Vegas Line. Basically, the FPI spits out data that mirror's what Vegas says. But, this is a pretty powerful predictive tool, because you can project several games into the future and extract some good statistics. As I have blogged about previously, I have my own (admittedly very simple) algorithm that also tends to spit out a fairly accurate point spread for any given college football game. I am in the process o