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College football playoff probabilities after week 10, 2016

By Dr. Ed Feng Leave a Comment

screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-9-14-32-amIt’s a crazy year in college football. It’s early November, and the week 11 slate of games leaves much to be desired.

The top team continue to plow their way towards the playoff, as everyone waits for Michigan to travel to Ohio State in a few weeks for clarity in the Big Ten.

I’ve been doing these projections for three years now, and I don’t remember such a lack of excitement the past two years.

By the way, forgot to post last week’s projections. If you’re a Alabama, Clemson or Louisville fan, check out their story here.

This week, I attempt to hammer home the point that the Big Ten will have a playoff team even though no teams have a top 4 probability. For my full explanation, click here.

Thanks for reading.

Filed Under: Big Ten Conference, Bleacher Report Column, College Football, College football 2016, College Football Analytics, College football playoff probabilities

The injustice of schedule in college football – how analytics can determine conference win probabilities

By Dr. Ed Feng 16 Comments

Brass Scales Of Justice Off Balance, Symbolizing Injustice, Over WhiteCollege football has a short season. Eight or nine games determine whether your teams wins its division or conference.

This conference schedule used to include all other teams in the conference, a round robin format. Then SEC commissioner Roy Kramer added Arkansas and South Carolina so his 12 team conference could hold a championship game. The Big Ten added Penn State to grow to 11 teams.

When conferences get bigger and separate into divisions, your team can no longer play every other team in the conference. While each team plays a round robin in its division, the cross division schedule can vary greatly.

For example, consider the Big Ten Legends division. Michigan plays Ohio State, a national title contender for most people, Penn State and Indiana from the other division. Michigan State plays Indiana, Purdue and Illinois, arguably the worst 3 teams in the conference.

The schedule imbalance is worse for LSU in the SEC West, as they face Georgia and Florida, two national championship contenders, from the other division. Alabama faces Tennessee and Kentucky instead.

This imbalance in schedule greatly affects your team’s chance to win its division.

Let’s put some numbers behind this injustice.

How to determine win probabilities for a conference

The game of football is inherently random. A fumble or a tipped pass can flip the results of a game in a single play. It can even derail Nick Saban’s Alabama dynasty for a few weeks, as AJ McCarron thew a goal line interception to seal their loss to Texas A&M last season.

To account for this randomness, I use the Monte Carlo method to simulate the 2013 college football season. This method employs random numbers to sample the many outcomes that can happen during the season.

Monte Carlo is the same technique Ed Thorpe used to test how his black jack strategy would perform in a casino. He did pretty well in those casinos, inspiring a generation of kids like Jeff Ma to win millions in Las Vegas.

How does this work for college football? Suppose Michigan has a 53% chance to beat Nebraska at home this season, as my preseason rankings predict. In a simulation, Michigan wins this game with 53% probability. Just like an actual football game, the simulation takes the uncertainty heading into the game and turns into the certainty of a win or loss. The simulation repeats this random picking of game winners for each game.

Flipping coins is the easy part of simulating the college football season. The computer then calculates the win loss record from the game results to determine the winner of the division. In the case of a tie, this gets complicated. The computer looks at head to head records and division records to determine a champion.

This simulation is repeated many times, and the win probability for a team is the fraction of simulations that it wins its division or conference.

The win probabilities for each game come from my preseason rankings. These are based on a regression model that considers a team’s rating in The Power Rank, turnovers and returning starters.

SEC West

This is the toughest division in college football. In my preseason rankings, three of the top 5 teams in the nation come from the SEC West. LSU brings up the rear behind Alabama and Texas A&M at 5th in the nation.

The schedule will make life even more difficult for the Tigers this season. Here are the cross division games for the top 3 teams; the first team is a rivalry game played every year.

  • Alabama – Tennessee, at Kentucky
  • Texas A&M – at Missouri, Vanderbilt
  • LSU – Florida, at Georgia

LSU faces Florida and Georgia, two teams that could contend not just for the SEC East title but also the national championship. Instead, Alabama faces two struggling programs in Tennessee and Kentucky with first year head coaches. This discrepancy surfaces in the win probabilities for the SEC West.

The Power Rank's preseason prediction for SEC WestAlabama has a 62% chance of winning the SEC West, while LSU has only a 9% chance. LSU coach Les Miles has complained about the schedule before, even suggesting that a “random computer draw” pick the cross division games. You know something is wrong when a football coach suggests using computers.

Big Ten Legends Division

Each Big Ten team also plays a fixed cross division game each year. For the three teams expected to contend for the Legends division, this game is first in these lists of cross division games in 2013.

  • Nebraska – at Penn State, Illinois, at Purdue
  • Michigan – Ohio State, at Penn State, Indiana
  • Michigan State – Indiana, Purdue, at Illinois

Michigan plays Ohio State, a potential national title contender, while Nebraska and Michigan State duck the Buckeyes this year. Michigan and Nebraska both play at Penn State, a program still in good shape despite the devastating sanctions from the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Instead, Michigan State gets arguably the 3 worst teams in the conference.

The Power Rank's preseason prediction for the Big Ten Legends Division.This division is an interesting case study for schedule imbalance since my preseason rankings rate these 3 teams so closely. Only a point and a half separate Nebraska from Michigan State, with Michigan in between.

In my simulations, Michigan State has a 34% chance to win the division. Michigan has a 19% chance despite a higher rating than the Michigan State. Nebraska, which has a home game against Michigan State, has 38% chance. The schedule does no favors for Michigan.

These odds are calculated from my preseason rankings, which rank Ohio State 16th in the nation. This is contrary to the national consensus that the Buckeyes will contend for the national title. If the Buckeyes are actually one of the top 3 teams in the country, the gap in win probability between Michigan and Michigan State will get larger.

Pac-12 North

Out west, teams play a nine game conference schedule. This includes the 5 teams from within the division and 4 of 6 teams from the other division. The California schools (Stanford, California in the North, USC and UCLA in the South) play each other each season.

These schools insisted on keeping these rivalries intact when the conference grew from 10 to 12 teams. And no one will argue against playing a historic rival every year, especially with the ticket sales these games generate. However, these games will have an impact on the Pac-12 North division.

Here are the cross division games for Oregon and Stanford, two highly ranked teams expected to contend for the division.

  • Oregon – at Colorado, UCLA, Utah, at Arizona
  • Stanford – Arizona State, at Utah, UCLA, at USC

In essence, Oregon plays at Colorado, the worst team in the South, while Stanford plays at USC, the best team in the South. As a result, Oregon has a 73% chance to win the division, while Stanford has a 19% chance.

The Power Rank's preseason projection for the Pac-12 NorthA big part of this discrepancy is that the preseason rankings have Oregon rated a touchdown better than Stanford. Whether this holds up depends on how well new Oregon coach Mark Helfrich does after Chip Kelly left for the Philadelphia Eagles. However, schedule also plays a role in these odds.

How to fix the imbalance in schedule

With today’s mega conferences in college football, your team no longer plays every other team in the conference. This can lead to an imbalance of schedule across teams in a division, as you can see in SEC West, Big Ten Legends and Pac-12 North this 2013 season. This imbalance will affect your team’s odds of winning the division.

In my next blog post, I’ll suggest how to fix this problem. There’s no perfect solution, except for going back to 1991 and convincing Roy Kramer not to add to additional teams to the SEC. But fans deserve better.

Do you have any suggestions for how to fix the imbalance in conference schedule? Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Big Ten Conference, College Football, College Football 2013, College Football Analytics, Jeff Ma, LSU Tigers, Michigan Wolverines, Stanford Cardinal

College Football Wrap Up

By Dr. Ed Feng Leave a Comment

With the conclusion of bowl season, two thing stand out. First, the National Championship game was absolutely unpredictable. Auburn’s much maligned defense dominated Oregon’s high powered running game. Oregon’s defense held quarterback Cam Newton in check. In the end, Auburn won by 3 as the SEC took home its 5th straight national championship. With Oregon as an almost 10 point favorite, The Power Rank got this one wrong.

Second, Black New Year’s for the Big Ten. The powers from the Midwest went 0-5 in New Year’s Day games, including an embarassing loss by co-champion Michigan State to Alabama. While The Power Rank missed the championship game, we were more accurate on the Big Ten. Ohio State and Wisconsin are good; everyone else is mediocre. Ohio State won a dramatic Sugar Bowl against Arkansas, while there’s no shame in Wisconsin’s close loss to TCU in the Rose Bowl. (OK, Badgers fans might disagree, but TCU is a solid program). Four other Big Ten teams lost, while Iowa needed a late interception returned for a touchdown to beat Missouri.

Overall, The Power Rank predictions went 16 for 29 against the line for a 55% win percentage. In addition, there was a push in the Auburn Oregon game and 5 games in which our system would not bet because our predictions were too close to the line. Not bad for an algorithm that doesn’t have any information about injuries or even understands the rules of American tackle football. In arriving at these results, we took lines from USA Today the night before each game. A hypothetical bet was made against the most favorable line. For example, Auburn was both a 2.5 and 3 point favorite against Oregon. Since we had Oregon winning by almost 10, we took Auburn -3. The game was a push. Strangely, the line moved to Oregon by 1 by the time the game kicked off.

Filed Under: Alabama Crimson Tide, Auburn Tigers, Big Ten Conference, Cam Newton, College Football, Michigan State Spartans, Oregon Ducks, TCU Horned Frogs

College Football Rankings, Week 7

By Dr. Ed Feng 4 Comments

Jim Delany is the commissioner of the Big Ten conference. It seems like he should be a good guy. He played college basketball for Dean Smith at North Carolina, earning the captaincy in his senior year. After staying at UNC for law degree, he worked his way through college athletics until he became the Big Ten commissioner in 1989. Even ex-jocks lose their hair, tarnishing that “I was once a stud on the basketball court” look. But, according to the authors of the new book Death to the BCS, Jim Delany is the biggest reason college football lacks a playoff system. To Delany and the 5 other commissioners of the BCS conferences, a playoff system means losing power, and power means more than any increase in revenue.

It’s fortunate for the Big Ten that Delany looks after its interests in the back rooms since its teams are having all kinds of difficulty on the field. Here are the latest results from the Power Rank:

16. Ohio St., 6-1, 14.06
19. Michigan St., 6-0, 13.93
22. Wisconsin, 5-1, 12.60
23. Iowa, 4-1, 12.43

47. Illinois, 2-3, 3.22
48. Michigan, 4-2, 3.21

70. Northwestern, 4-1, -3.13
74. Purdue, 3-2, -3.79
78. Penn St., 2-3, -4.87
82. Minnesota, 1-5, -5.18
89. Indiana, 3-2, -8.88

The top four teams are in the bottom of the top 25, the next two teams are treading water above average, and the bottom five teams are in the bottom half of the 120 Division I football teams. In terms of out of conference wins, the Big Ten has two of note: an Ohio State win over Miami (+12) and a Wisconsin win over Arizona State (+1). Sorry, wins over Notre Dame don’t count this year. One could argue that Boise State, with wins over Virginia Tech (+3) and Oregon State (+13), has a better resume of out of conference wins. But the Power Rank accounts for margin of victory as well as wins and losses. To understand why this algorithm thinks so poorly of the Big Ten, let’s look at two games. Michigan State beat Florida Atlantic, the 90th team in the Power Rank, by 13 points. This result does not instill much confidence in the second best team in the league. Also, Wisconsin beat San Jose State, the 92nd team in the Power Rank, by 13 points at home. To put this in perspective, Boise State went to San Jose and blugeoned the Spartans 48-0.

It’s still early in the season, but the out of conference results look really poor for the Big Ten.

5. Stanford (4-1) 18.41. Nifty trick to zoom up 10 spots to #5 during a bye week. A two point win over USC looks much better after the Trojans pummel California by 34 points this past week.

10. USC (5-2) 16.01. Two weeks ago, USC, coached by not Pete Carroll, was 69th in the Power Rank. With a last minute two point loss to Stanford and a huge 34 point win over California, USC moves up to 10th.

18. San Diego State (3-2) 13.94. The Aztecs finally got a marque win over Air Force. We’ll find out later this season if they’re truly this good as San Diego State still has games with Utah and TCU.

Filed Under: Big Ten Conference, College Football, Death to the BCS, Jim Delany

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