Tuesday, October 14, 2014

College Football Math: Week 8 Watchability, Dashboard Updates and a Cool Graph


Before we start, I've added an easy reference collection of everything college football-related. It has links to all my key college football-related material. Just follow the blue arrow.


For the main event:

Last week I was asked how likely we are to end the college football season with no undefeated teams, 1 undefeated team, 2 undefeated teams, and so forth. I think the question was from an Oregon fan grasping for hope. 

I started looking into it, and then I remembered: anything that's worth doing is worth overdoing. So instead of only looking for how many teams will go undefeated, I went a little further, and made this. It's all of the possible number of losses, by team, in one chart. It shows the likelihood we end up with each number of teams for each amount of losses. For some specific examples:
  • There's a 34% chance with end up with 0 teams that have 0 losses. In other words, there's a 34% chance we end up with no undefeated teams. 
  • There's only a 19% chance we end up with a winless team (SMU or Kent State)
  • 5 losses is the most likely number of losses across the FBS



Team Dashboards
    • I've updated the both the Team Dashboard and the Expanded Team Dashboard through week 7 
      • Who can guess which teams are a) most likely to win out and b) most likely to lose out? A couple of the teams totally surprised me.

    Watchability
    • Week 8 Watchability index is below
    • This seems like a good mind to restate that Watchability is a context neutral statistic. It doesn't know which team is your favorite, it doesn't if a game has CFP implications, it doesn't know if a game is a bowl game. It doesn't know if a game is a rivalry game, or the rose bowl, or the CFP championship game. All it knows is how good the teams are and how close the game is likely to be.

    No comments:

    Post a Comment