Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

In the first two parts of this series, I explained my general methodology to analyze a season of college football and I gave the results of my analysis of the Big Ten . Of course, this analysis was predicated on the idea that somehow the original college football schedule will get played, perhaps in the Spring. While I know that that is extremely unlikely, I hope that at least imagining some version of a normal football season, or normal life in general, brings with it some comfort. I know that it does for me. That said, today I present the remainder of my hopelessly optimistic 2020 college football preview, starting with a whirlwind tour of the rest of the nation. Let's begin with the SEC. SEC Table 1 below gives an overview of the results of both my one-million cycle Monte Carlo simulation and the strength of schedule calculations for the SEC. Table 1 : Summary of the full season odds for the SEC based on a one million cycle Mont Carlo simulation As the table shows, both the SEC...

In Part One of this series, I introduced the methodology that I use to perform my preseason analysis of the upcoming college football season. Even though this year will almost certainly stray significantly from the original plan, I am still using it as a base case in my analysis.   I also introduced my updated Monte Carlo simulation of the upcoming season which has the unique feature of taking into account the variability of the preseason rankings themselves.  I mentioned that my new simulation can generate all sorts of probabilities for each team, including win distributions, division and conference title odds, playoff and national title odds.   In addition, I have a few new tricks up my sleeve for 2020, what ever becomes of it... and it is now time to take a closer look at what might come to pass in the Big Ten, if we somehow get to play the original schedules. New Metrics for 2020 One of the most difficult factors in college to measure is strength of schedul...

In a normal year, I look forward to the month of July as a time to start focusing on the upcoming college football season. I start looking at MSU's roster, and I start to update my football spreadsheets and databases in preparation to perform both preseason and in-season analyses. In a normal year, if I were to write a story containing the title "hopelessly optimistic" it would likely be focused on MSU's odds to win the Big Ten or make the College Football Playoffs.  While I still plan to cover both of those topics eventually, my hopeless optimism in 2020 refers simply to the hope that we get any college football at all. At this point, we still do not know how this all going to play out. Right now, the odds of the full schedule being played (starting, for example, in the spring of 2021) seem extremely low.  The odds of a shorter schedule in the Fall are better, but still may not be great.  The Big Ten and a few other conferences have already announced that they will o...

Being a student athlete at a major university is hard. I certainly remember the long hours that I put in as a student in MSU’s engineering program, and I did not even have than many extracurricular activities. It is hard to imagine the time management skills required of today’s student athlete at a place like MSU.  A select few college athletes will go on to make money playing sports professionally. But, the old NCAA tag line still applies to most student athletes: about 99 percent of them are going to go pro in something other than sports. Furthermore, any athletic career is fleeting and can end in an instant. Student athletes need to be prepared for life after sports, whenever that life begins. In order for an institution like MSU to complete its mission, it needs to make sure that all its graduates enter the world with an education and a degree that will help them succeed. To this end, running an athletic department is also hard. At least, doing it the right way is hard. In some...

Dear John, About a year ago, when some initial quotes surfaced from your new book Overtime , they originally raised my eyebrows. No, it wasn't the quotes from Chapter 32, "Hard to Beat the Cheaters," nor was it the quotes from your heavily slanted take on the Michigan - Michigan State rivalry from Chapters 28 ("Bad Blood") and 29 ("Cavalry's Coming.") The quotes that caught my eye came from Chapter 12, "Student Athletes," which outlines the alleged changes that the University of Michigan made to the way it handles the academics of athletes, specifically on the football team.  Some of the initial "facts and figures" that I saw in that chapter looked suspicious. I had a curious eye fixed on Coach Harbaugh to see how he would handle academics now that he was in charge. At the time that I first became aware of this chapter, your book had not yet hit the shelves, and certain corroborating data that should have been publicly available...