Dr. Green and White Sports Authority

This is the 3rd installment of my annual preseason analysis, where I use various mathematical projections in order to predict how the college football season might play out. I started with an overview and summary of the Big 10, which can be found here . I then took a look at the SEC and ACC, which can be found here .  As for today, 12s are wild as we round out the Power 5 with the Big 12 and Pac 12.  Let's kick things off on the Great Plains. Big 12 As I did with the previous conferences, let's begin with my overall summary of the Big 12: Based on this data, the Big 12 is only projected to have 3 teams of roughly Top 25 quality (Oklahoma (6), Texas (17), and Iowa State (26)), and only those teams are likely to have a realistic shot to win the Title.  I suppose that Baylor (37), Oklahoma State (36), or TCU (34) could rise up and cause problems, but as it stands now those teams all have only a ~4% chance to win the conference.  The rest of the league seems t...

Welcome to Part 2 of my ongoing series digging deep into the upcoming football season. In the first installment of this series, I went into detail about my methodology and went into excruciating detail about MSU and the Big Ten. I would like to continue with a bit more concise analysis of the remaining Power 5 conferences, starting with the SEC. I will start with a chart summarizing the bulk of my calculations for the boys down South. SEC Off the bat, I need to point out that the SEC is likely the most difficult conference to analyze using my methods. One of the basic assumptions that I use is that the rankings correspond linearly to the actual strength of each team.  In other words, the 21st team in the country is as much better than the 22nd ranked team as the #1 team is than the #2 team and that the #2 team is than the #3 team. My own data tells me that this isn't true at the very top of the scale in any given year, and with teams like Alabama and Clemson it appears to b...

It is a bit hard to believe, but in a little less than a month, a new season of college football will have begun.  Every serious fan or family of fans has their own special set of traditions when it comes to college football. Mine has taken a bit of a nerdy path over the past two decades. You see, over the years I have developed an increasing complex set of formulas and algorithms which I use to analyze the college football landscape. While this "math" is perhaps most useful over the course of the season, many of the tools that I have developed are quite helpful when it comes to predicting how the upcoming football season might play out.  Putting together these predictions is one of my new favorite late summer traditions. I have written about my general methodology in the past, so here is the "short" version. Over the years I have developed a very simple algorithm to generate power rankings from the final scores of every single Division 1 football game in a give...

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 rec...

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...

I have seen a lot of collective hand-wringing from the on-line MSU fan base about MSU's current football recruiting class. But, any time something like this happens, it always provokes a series of questions in my mind.  How does this class really compare to other Big Ten schools?  Is this normal or not? What is the historical trend?  Well, I just so happen to have been assembling a database of Big Ten recruiting classes back to 2007, and I think that I can provide some pretty clear answers to those questions.  First, I will say a few things about my methods.  The data-set that I have the easiest access to is the Rivals database, so I use that exclusively.  In this system, a "5-star" ranking system is used, but they also use a finer-grained "rating" system that scores a player from 5.2 to 6.1.  The number of players in each tier changes a bit from year to year, but in general there are about 35 five-star (6.1) players a year nationally, about 400 fo...