Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

A week or so ago, I explained what might be a new method to quantify the strength of schedule of various college football teams by calculating the expected wins of each team using a normalized power ranking.  At that point, I presented just the data for the Big Ten in conference play. As a supplement to that piece, I expanded my analysis to include all FBS teams, both overall and in conference play. I also came up with a better way to visualize the data, I think.  While I am not going to into too much more detail here, the results are interesting, so I thought I would do a data dump before the season really gets underway. For my new visualization, I am plotting the expected win total (i.e. the sum of the individual game win probabilities) versus the preseason ranking for each team.  I added a simple trend line for comparison, because my initial analysis showed that the higher ranked teams tend to grade out with easier schedules, in part because they don't have to play themselve

It's Fall. It's 2019, and Spartans Fans, we are Back on Line.  After the long, dark summer of All Around bad Tiger's baseball, the dawning of another season of MSU football seems Heaven Sent.  The season is so close that I can almost Taste It, and for some reason, I still have the Strange Desire to continue to write about it. For the past several years, I have been providing a weekly preview and summary of each weekend's action, and this year I will give it yet another go. As for MSU, the key question on everyone's mind is the offense, and the Communication from the staff has not been doled out In Excess.  Honestly, I have no idea where we are right now. The Men and Women of Spartan Nation have a lot of Questions.  Will MSU really run tempo?  How fast of tempo?  All the time, or just in spots?  Will there really be a lot more RPOs? Who will be the featured running back? Is the new system really fully implemented, or was there Not Enough Time since the Spring?  Wil

Yesterday's announcement of yet another book on Michigan football by John U. Bacon got a lot of buzz on the internet.  While most people were focused on the accusations lodged by Harbaugh on so-called "cheaters," I was more interested on Bacon's comment that an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to the subject of how Harbaugh has changed the academic culture on the football team in response to past criticisms (some of which came from... Jim Harbaugh).  Since Harbaugh arrived, I have been curious to track what changes he might make on the academic side of the football team.  The University has been criticized in the past for operating "safe harbor" programs in the Kinesiology and General Studies programs.  A detailed look into this SEC-Style Diploma Mill strategy can be found here .   Over the past few years, I have periodically checked various on-line sources to see if any change was evident. To my surprise, what I found was that information ab

As we move closer to the start of the 2019 College Football Season, one topic that comes up periodically is the question of strength of schedule.  Does Team A have some sort of schedule advantage over Team B?  As with many topics, everyone seems to have an opinion on this, but it is actually a bit tricky to try to quantify it. After all, how does one actually measure strength of schedule? I have seen a few different approaches to this, such as quantifying the winning percentage of a team's opponents and also a team's opponent's opponents.  That is OK, but I am not sure really what that tells us at a deeper level or how one can really compare one team to another. A method that I currently like is to use the expected value of wins (the sum of the odds to win each individual game).  What I do is I take the group of teams in question (say, the entire Big Ten) and I calculate the expected conference win total for each team if I make the assumption that all the teams in the c

Now that I have released my projections for 2019, I thought that it might make sense to take a quick look back my projections for the 2018 to see what I got right, and what I got wrong.  I had a few questions about the accuracy of my methodology.  So, let's take a look, starting close to home. Big Ten 2018 projection:   Ohio State had the best raw odds (38%) in the East, but my simulation saw a 2-way tie between MSU and Penn State, with the Lions winning the tie-breaker.  In the West, Wisconsin had the best raw odds (66%), while my projection really liked Iowa to win the West What actually happened :  Ohio State and Northwestern (preseason odds = 11%) won their divisions What went wrong:   Penn State failed to beat any other good team in the East, despite a friendly schedule and MSU was a lot worse than expected.  Out West, Wisconsin was worse than expected, Iowa lost a lot of close games, while Northwestern won all their close games. SEC 2018 projection:   Alabama had

Over the past 5 days, I have provided a detailed mathematical analysis of the upcoming college football season. In general, my analysis of each conference ended with my projections for each conference's winner. Today, in the final installment of this series, I will put all the pieces together to make my final projections of which teams will make the Playoffs and the other New Years Six Bowl Games. First, I will start with a review of my projections for each conference's Title game.  The record after each team is their projected record after the conference championship game. Big Ten: Michigan (11-2) over Nebraska (11-2) SEC: Georgia (12-1) over LSU (9-4) ACC:  Clemson (13-0) over Miami (10-3) Big 12: Oklahoma (13-0) over Iowa State (10-3) Pac 12: Washington (12-1) over USC (8-5) AAC: Cincinnati (11-2) over Memphis (12-1) MWest: Boise State (11-2) over San Diego State (11-2) C-USA: LA Tech (10-3) over Florida Atlantic (9-4) MAC: Toledo (11-2) over Ohio (10-3) Su

Welcome to Part 4 of my ongoing series using math to analyze the upcoming college football season. While the vast majority of summer analysis focuses on the Power Five, I would like to take a little time to look at the rest of the FBS, those five conferences known as the Group of Five. In the current New Years Six Bowl System, one slot is reserved for the best overall team from the Group of Five. Based on the NY6 Bowl rotation, this team will be playing in the Cotton Bowl this year. The Group of Five as a whole is 3-2 in NY6 games, so they have actually been fairly competitive as a group. (The Wolverines are 0-2. Just saying'.)  So, let's take a look to see which team might be traveling to Dallas over this Holidays this year. American Athletic Conference (AAC) Let's kick things off with the AAC, starting with the same summary table that I used for the Power 5 conferences: The AAC has produced the last two NY6 participants (UCF both times) and 3 of the total 5 (Bo