Wednesday, November 23, 2011

College Football Over and Under Achieving Teams

An interesting thought occurred to me this week.  What if I used my current ratings as if they were the ratings starting the year and projected the records each team should have at this point and compare them with their real records?  Doing so should tell us which teams have overachieved (their real record is better than the projected) or underachieved (real record is worse than projected).

Here are some of the top teams and if the conclusion makes sense.

LSU is 11-0, but would be projected to be 10-1 (53%), 11-0 a 35.3% chance.  This is primarily due to the Alabama game being on the road and given how that game played out, it somewhat makes sense to say that they overachieved by a game thus far.

Alabama on the other hand is 10-1 and would be projected to be 11-0 (46.2%) but 10-1 would be 45.8% so very close.  A slight underachievement makes sense here too.

Houston is 11-0 but would be projected to be 10-1 (41.4%) with 11-0 a 30.8% chance.  So they have slightly overachieved.

Boise State is 9-1 and they would be projected to be 9-1 (41.3%), so they are about where they should be.

Wisconsin is 9-2 but would be projected to be 10-1 (37.7%) so they have underachieved a bit which I think most would agree with.

Stanford is 10-1 but is barely projected to be 9-2 (34.2%) vs 10-1 (33.7%), so a slight overachievement, and perhaps a bit of luck winning the USC game, else they would be 9-2.

Michigan is 9-2 and should be 9-2 (32.4%).

Oklahoma State is 10-1 but should be 9-2 (31.6%) but 10-1 (27.7%) isn't that far off.

Oregon is 9-2 and should be 9-2 (40.9%).

Virginia Tech is 10-1 but should be 9-2 (31.2%) so they have overachieved.

These projections being this close would seem to validate that my regular algorithm's ratings are pretty close to what they should be.  I'll probably do this analysis more often in the future.

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