College Football Week 8

Don't walk to me about WSU. The week the Huskies play Oregon is rivalry week. WSU is a rival like your kid brother you beat up is a rival. Sometimes they get one but c'mon.

Oregon is the rival. UO @ UW stands out as the most watchable game of a week filled with medium games. Oregon can keep their CFP hopes alive, and essentially lock-up the Pac-12 north with a win. UW needs a win & a future Oregon loss to get back in the Pac 12 title conversation.

Clemson and LSU have trap games - going on the road to play a medium team, particularly LSU as they look forward to Auburn  and then Bama.

The dashboards and side bars are updated through this week, happy football! The Games of the Week sidebar now gives odds a bit more dynamically. I calculate the impact on CFP, bowl, conference championship, and group of 5 chances, then show whichever two statistics are most relevant.

College Football 2019

Apologies all for my late start this year. I was super lucky to be on vacation for August and September, so now I'm getting back into things. Rest assumed I was following the college football season from afar, and am thrilled to be back behind the spreadsheets.

Let's refresh a little on how things work. I'm focused on college football now, which means we've got predictive rankings on one side, and games of the week on the other.

Predictive rankings are meant to look forward - the model would always favor one team over any lower rated team. This is a good way to rank teams, certainly a more transparent one than whatever the AP voters user, but it does lead to some interesting results.

Games of the week are the 10 most "watchable" games. Watchibility is a metric I created that rates games as watchable or not, based on how good the team playing are, and how close the game is likely to be. For the 10 most watchable games, I dive a little deeper into who's likely to win, what the implications are for that teams CFP, Bowl, or Conference title hopes.

Finally I have dashboards for every team, those dashboards tell you about a team's schedule, odds of winning each game, and gives a little snapshot of the season. This annotated dashboard can explain it all.

One of the core pieces of the model is a concept I've named Posterior Win Probability, a powerful way to adjust teams ratings as we get new information (e.g. watch their games) throughout the season.

OK let's look at the week ahead. I like weeks like this where the good games happen to not overlap. We get Colorado Oregon on Friday night, leading right into the red river showdown, then Sparty vs. Wisconsin and WSU @ ASU, finally into the peak night games.

Then we bring it home with UW @ Arizona at 8(?!???!!!!) PM Saturday night.

College Football Week 8

We've taken a few weeks off here, just travelling for work and also having less extra energy for hobbiies with work taking up more time.

But here we are for week 8.

I'm shocked to see the Cougs are favored at home vs. the Ducks, but there we are. As a Dawg I'm all in on team cougars because we neeeed the ducks to take another L.

Go cougs!

College Football Week 5

College Football Week 4

The beginning of conference place brings us some doozies. Texas hosts TCU after crushind USC last week. Also TCU lost to Ohio State, so Texas just might be back.

College Football Week 3 (for real)

OK Now we play a real week 3. It's kind of fitting too, last week's slate was a little meh, but this week looks fantastic. I mean, look at that slate of Top games. We've got some potential for big / fun upsets (looking at you TCU & Boise State), and of course top teams that will hold serve (Washington!)...

College Football Week 3 (2?)

Why do we have to have that weird week one! 4 games between teams no one has heard of but it messes up my model naming conventions and creates all kinds of possibility of bugs.

Plus it feels like such an anti-climatic way to start the season.

But good news, the season is underway. We have excellent set of week 3 game to look forward to, and I've got my dashboard tool back up and running. Click on the link over in the right hand column, type and your team's name, and behold.