One thing I thought would be fun (for me, at least) would be to try to come up with my own statistical model to use to try to predict the outcomes of college football games. A couple people on texags.com already do it, so I stole the idea from them and decided to give it a try this year.
Basically I compiled all the stats I felt were relevant, and then organized them and created ratings (relative to the average) for a handful of different categories. Then, using my own ideas of how they relate to each other, made a few formulas that I can use to plug those statistics in and then get a prediction for how those teams will fare against each other. Basically I do two sets of predictions and then average them. One of them looks at things from one team's offensive perspective and pits them against the defense's ratings, and the other looks at that same team's defensive stats and pits those against their opponents offensive ratings. From there, I add in home field advantage and my own top secret rating to account for strength of schedule, and out comes a prediction.
I will try to post these each Thursday in advance of that weekend's games. I'll probably only do around 20 games a week, mainly Big 12 games and other games of note, simply because it can be a little time consuming. And for the first few weeks, I'm forced to use last season's stats, which admittedly is somewhat useless. I am hoping that about 3 or 4 weeks in, each team will have enough current history to maybe make some semi-valid predictions. Until then, I'm using last year's numbers and with all the year-to-year turnover in college football, it renders these predictions pretty useless, but still fun. I expect that some of them will be pretty good, and some of them will be wildly wrong.
As you'll see, a few of these really jump out, and for some of them, there are obvious reasons. The Auburn score, for example, is obviously affected by the fact that Cam Newton was on the team last year. Everyone with a brain this year has rated Auburn to be worse than they were last year, so take this first prediction for what it's worth.
Some big numbers also pop up. Oklahoma State will supposedly score 72 points. That may sound crazy, but at the same time, that actually probably does happen once a week in college football, so it's not much of a stretch to say that OSU could do that this week. I actually kind of like the fact that my predictions include some huge blowouts and high scoring games, because those things do happen in real life, but people rarely predict them.
Anyway, all that being said, here is what came out of my computer for week 1:
Teams/Vegas line/My computer prediction
TCU -6/56 36
Baylor 24
SMU 26
A&M -16/56 36
UNLV 11
Wisc -35/56 36
Miss St -29 50
Memphis 12
Wake Forest 7
Syracuse -6 30
Utah St 16
Auburn -22/56 62
Akron 6
Ohio St -34/48 47
Miami (OH) 9
Mizzou -17/47.5 31
Kent St 6
Alabama -37/45.5 30
UCLA 28
Houston -3/61.5 56
W. Michigan 34
Michigan -14/61 33
Minnesota 26
USC -21/51.5 47
S. Florida 15
Notre Dame -10/47 19
BYU -3/55 35
Mississippi 30
S. Carolina -20/62 62
E. Carolina 28
Rice 19
t.u. -24/55 48
Tulsa 31
OU -24.5/64.5 58
Boise St -3.5/51 27
Georgia 17
Oregon -3/55 32
LSU 22
ULaLa 18
Ok State -36.5/62.5 72
FAU 10
Florida -35/46.5 35
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