Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

For a variety of reasons, there a celebratory mood inside the Jack Breslin Student Events Center on Monday night. The Michigan State Spartans were able to shake off a slow start and pull away from a scrappy Oakland squad by a final score of 79-62. In doing so, the Spartans were able to build on Saturday's huge win over the No. 6 Baylor Bears in Detroit's Little Caesar's Arena. The game itself was also celebration of college basketball in the state of Michigan which pitted the current longest tenured coach in all of college basketball (Oakland's Greg Kampe in his 39th season) against the third longest tenured coach (Michigan State's Tom Izzo in his 28th season).  But the biggest celebration of the night was reserved for the Spartans' senior guard Tyson Walker, who scored his 1,000th point in a Michigan State uniform with a baseline catch-and-shoot baseline jumper midway through the second half. https://twitter.com/B1GMBBall/status/1736922753813422184 Walker becam...

The 2023-24 basketball season is off to a strange start for the Michigan State Spartans. We are just six weeks into the season, and the fortunes of Michigan State have already reserved course multiple times. Even within a single game, the Spartans have looked like a Final Four team one minute and an N.I.T. team the next. This past weekend at Little Caesar Arena against the Baylor Bears, it was the Final Four version of the Spartans who showed up. That version of the team finally decided to hang around for the full 40 minutes. As a result, Michigan State blew the doors off the No. 6 ranked team in the country. At the same time, the Spartans have a current record of just 5-5. Michigan State has already taken enough losses to seriously impact the chance at a Big Ten title and a lofty seed in March. Prior to the Spartans' first Big Ten game against Wisconsin, I provided an overview of Michigan State's Big Ten prospects, including expected wins, title odds, strength of schedule, and...

As a general rule, there are two types of college football fans: those who enjoy the traditional bowl games and those who do not. I personally fall squarely into the first category. I can certainly see the argument that most bowls are unnecessary exhibitions between mediocre teams playing in half empty stadiums in some borderline (to be generous) tourist location. This argument is not factually false. For a counterargument I can only offer the following: bowl games are fun and at the end of the day sports are meant to be fun. Do I want to watch the third-place ACC team take on the fourth place Big 12 team on Dec. 28 in Orlando in a bowl game named after my favorite Kellogg's toaster pastry? The answer is clearly "yes," and I will celebrate with not one, but two perfected toasted raspberry Pop-Tarts at half time. Don't judge. Furthermore, with the expanded 12-team playoff starting next December, it is not clear what the future holds for many of the lower-tier bowl game...

The 2023-24 college basketball season kicked off just under a month ago and the action across the country is heating up. Big Ten conference action officially kicked off this weekend and a total of 12 conference games will be played in the month of December. At the beginning of the season, the various prognosticators and pollsters had an idea of which teams would challenge for the Big Ten title and other post season glory. But we now have a month of actual data about the relative strength of each team. It is time to put that data to work. Throughout the Michigan State football season, I provided bi-weekly updates on the odds of various season outcomes. I utilized my own power rankings and a set of simulation and other analytical tools to generate these odds. My process for college basketball is very similar. The major difference is that I prefer to use efficiency metrics, specifically those tabulated by Ken Pomeroy ("Kenpom") to estimate point spreads and odds. These data corr...

The conference championships have all been played and, in all honesty, last night's results were the absolute worst-case scenario for the Selection Committee. Michigan and Washington will almost certainly be given the No. 1 and No. 2 seed and be placed in the Sugar Bowl and the Rose Bowl respectively. But there are four other teams with a reasonable claim on the last two spots and I have no idea what the committee is going to do. Florida State is undefeated, but the Seminoles played the weakest schedule of the four candidates and their star quarterbac (Jordan Travis) suffered a season ending injury in the second-to-last game of the regular season. Florida State is outside of the Top 10 in both the FPI and in my power rankings. I also the Seminoles ranked No. 5 in my strength of record metric, behind two of the other three candidates. Georgia is the defending national champions and were previously ranked No. 1 coming into the week. But after losing to Alabama in the SEC Title game, ...

The season for the Michigan State Spartans is over, but there are still college football games to be played, numbers to be crunched and potential wagers to be placed. To this end, I will continue to provide analysis for the remainder of the college football season, starting new with a preview of Championship Week and with my standard set of recommended bets. Championship Week Picks As has been the traditional all season, Figure 1 below gives an overview summary of all my computer's projections for the week in comparison to the opening Vegas spread. The same data generated by EPSN's Football Power Index is shown in Figure 2. Figure 1:  Comparison of the projected final margins of victory based on my algorithm to the opening Vegas lines for Championship Week. Figure 2:  Comparison of the projected final margins of victory based on ESPN's FPI to the opening Vegas lines for Week 12. There are a total of 10 contests this weekend and have also included the traditional Army/Navy...