Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

Over the past few weeks, I have explained some of the background around my annual, math-based analysis of the upcoming college football season. In that process we have learned how accurate the preseason rankings are (plus-or-minus 25 spots, on average) and investigated what the prognosticators got right last year (Georgia), what they got wrong (Oklahoma and TCU), as well as the influence of ability, schedule, and luck. With that foundation in place, it is now time to shift focus to the 2023 season. I have now inputted the data from the preseason rankings and completed 100,000 simulations of the upcoming season. I will soon go through the full details of what I learned from these simulations.  For today, I will focus exclusively on what it says about the Michigan State Spartans. We will take a close look at the Spartans' schedule from three different points of view. Schedule Overview The best place to start this analysis is with the inputs to the simulation. Each year there are two ...

For close to a decade, I have been utilizing a set of mathematical tools that allow me to better understand college sports. One of the tools that I have developed over the years is a method to simulate the results of the full college football season, including accurate odds for various future events such as division and conference winners and regular season win totals. Every year, a key input into that simulation is a consensus ranking of all FBS-level teams. A second key input is the uncertainty (i.e. historical accuracy) of those rankings, which I summarized in the first installment of this preseason series. Today, I wanted to provide a more specific example of the type of information that my simulation provides and how it performs historically. The most recent set of data is that from last year. So today. let's look at the predictions that my simulations made about a year ago regarding the 2022 season and how those predictions turned out. 2022 Division and Conference Prediction ...

It has been almost six months since the Georgia Bulldogs claimed the National Title by beating Texas Christian and it has been slightly less than three months since the Michigan State Spring Football Kickoff event. But now that the calendar has turned to July, we are less than two months away from the return of college football. The Spartans' roster experienced an unexpected shake up in the spring with former offensive stars Payton Thorne and Keon Coleman deciding to leave East Lansing via the transfer portal. Other teams across the country have experienced similar changes. Now that the dust has settled, it is time to start looking forward to the 2023 season. While there is rampant speculation every year about the next season as soon as the clock hits all zeros in the National Title game, early July is the time when the official preseason rankings start to appear online and on the magazine stands.  This is also the time of year when regular season win totals are available for betti...