Best Bowl matchups

The folks over at the SBNation main site released their big college football preview.  One of the most interesting pages that they do annually is their bowl projections.  I went ahead and categorized the matchups they gave by how close the projections put the bowl game being, as well as what the spread should be.

Team 1	Opponent	Team 1Win Chance	Average Spread	Departure from Even
Michigan State	UCLA	47.40%	-1	2.60%
Western Michigan	Appalachian State	52.90%	1	2.90%
Georgia Tech	Texas	53.00%	1	3.00%
Wisconsin	Arizona State	45.40%	-2	4.60%
Michigan	Georgia	44.60%	-2	5.40%
Oklahoma	Southern California	56.00%	2	6.00%
Central Florida	Bowling Green State	56.00%	2	6.00%
Kansas State	California	56.90%	3	6.90%
Minnesota	Arkansas	41.50%	-3	8.50%
Nebraska	Texas A&M	40.80%	-3	9.20%
Utah State	Utah	40.10%	-4	9.90%
West Virginia	Missouri	39.30%	-4	10.70%
Oklahoma State	Louisiana State	38.50%	-4	11.50%
Louisville	Tennessee	38.30%	-4	11.70%
Alabama	Oregon	62.70%	4	12.70%
Texas-El Paso	New Mexico	35.80%	-5	14.20%
Boise State	Notre Dame	33.90%	-6	16.10%
Virginia Tech	Penn State	66.40%	6	16.40%
Toledo	Georgia Southern	67.00%	6	17.00%
Duke	Mississippi State	31.90%	-7	18.10%
Iowa	Arizona State	31.40%	-7	18.60%
East Carolina	Louisiana-Lafayette	69.70%	7	19.70%
Florida State	Auburn	70.40%	7	20.40%
Baylor	Mississippi	72.20%	8	22.20%
Arkansas State	San Jose State	72.90%	8	22.90%
Houston	South Carolina	25.20%	-9	24.80%
Temple	Rice	75.50%	10	25.50%
North Carolina State	Stanford	23.20%	-10	26.80%
Northern Illinois	Colorado State	77.20%	11	27.20%
Cincinnati	Western Kentucky	78.90%	11	28.90%
San Diego State	Texas State	79.40%	12	29.40%
Ohio State	Texas Christian	79.50%	11	29.50%
Pittsburgh	Memphis	81.00%	12	31.00%
Maryland	Air Force	83.60%	14	33.60%
Miami(FL)	Marshall	85.80%	15	35.80%
Middle Tennessee State	Akron	86.10%	15	36.10%
Old Dominion	Brigham Young	10.90%	-17	39.10%
North Carolina	Navy	93.20%	21	43.20%

The best matchup in their projection is a battle of old school powers in Michigan State and UCLA, while the UNC-Navy game would be one to skip.

NFL Preseason to Regular season correlation

So, there have been a few posts over on MileHighReport talking about the team's preseason performance so far.  There's been some speculation that in recent years defensive stats have been a decent indicator of regular season performance.  I wanted to test this a bit, checking to see if there was any real link between the two.

Going back to 2012, I found total yards allowed per game in pre and regular season, as well as yards per play.  The results were not encouraging.  In the following chart, we'll see Yards per game has an R^2 of just .11, an extremely basic correlation.

 

Yards per play is even worse, with an R^2 of just .03.

We shouldn't expect there to be any real predictive power for preseason play.  Schemes offensively and defensively are vanilla through and through, with no game planning to attack weaknesses.  You also get extreme variance with a lot of guys playing extended snaps, who will likely be selling cars in a few weeks.

College football Top 25 Projection

This summer has been busy.  I have managed however to find some time to tweak the formulas I've used to predict team strength and come up with some composite rankings.  The changes centered a lot on removing some emphasis on turnover luck (it really has a very low significance for explaining year to year variability), and redid my returning experience formula.  It should help give a much better view of a team over a season, since the formula had a new reduced standard error equal to about half of what it had been.

In season I'll be making a few tweaks to what happens for a team afflicted with injuries, which of course will as the old military adage goes, ruin this ranking at first contact.

Team	Ranking
Alabama	1
Ohio State	2
Southern California	3
UCLA	4
Oregon	5
Oklahoma	6
Baylor	7
Stanford	8
Florida State	9
Notre Dame	10
Georgia	11
Texas A&M	12
Texas Christian	13
Mississippi	14
Arizona State	15
Clemson	16
Oklahoma State	17
Michigan	18
Texas	19
Missouri	20
Texas Tech	21
Michigan State	22
Florida	23
Arizona	24
Miami(FL)	25

It loves the Pac-12, which I think will continue to shine.  I do doubt though we see USC, UCLA and Oregon in the top 5 or so at the end of the year.  I'm also not nearly as high on Florida, but they could be a darkhorse with that defensive secondary.

The program also generates odds for a team to win a range of games, which I'll sort by below, going from the best chances to win at least 11 games in the regular season.

Team	Ranking
Ohio State	1
Florida State	2
UCLA	3
Alabama	4
Southern California	5
Oklahoma	6
Notre Dame	7
Baylor	8
Marshall	9
Nebraska	10
Boise State	11
Penn State	12
Georgia	13
Cincinnati	14
Stanford	15
Oregon	16
Massachusetts	17
Texas Christian	18
Wisconsin	19
Michigan	20
Northern Illinois	21
Michigan State	22
Clemson	23
Texas A&M	24
Oklahoma State	25

Yetisburg

 Sometimes you see a game at the store and the name just begs you to buy it.  That game a couple weeks ago was Yetisburg, a civil war combat game with a fantasy setting twist.  The Union and the Confederacy square off with the aid of melee combat specialist Yetis and long range artillery Mastodons.  

Each player has access to identical armies, each with infantry and cavalry (regular and elite troopers, the elite being able to withstand more damage before needing to head to the hospital), Generals, Mastodons and Yetis.  Game play is pretty straightforward.  Each player has 5 columns of troops, 3 rows deep.  The first and second rows, the front and reserve lines, are face up and can make attacks or take advantage of abilities.  The third row is the supply line, face down cards that will be used to replenish the first two rows when when those cards are killed in combat.  Player's take turns attacking by playing a card from their hand, and ordering all troops of that card type to attack.  Results of the attack are created randomly, by drawing a meat token and flipping it over to see what direction the shot went, and what the range of the shot is.  Damage is dealt by counting the number of rows in the direction listed, according to the units ability. Regular troops all deal one damage while yetis and mastodons deal damage equal to the range. Killed troops are sent to the discard pile, and lines are replenished.  This goes back and forth until both players have either exhausted all their troops or both players pass their turn to attack. After that, players can use their Generals in the field to refresh troops for the next turn, swap positions, or bring troops back from the discard pile into the fight. The game continues on until someone cannot reinforce their lines from the supply line, or when drawing cards for their hand cant draw anymore.  

 Yeti combat is a little different from regular troops. They move to a row in between the players front lines called the trench.  Yetis crash through their own lines, killing friendly troops to get into the trench, and if their is an opposing Yeti in the trench for their column, they will knock them back to the opponents front lien, killing any troops that are there.  If a Yeti gets hit by friendly fire, they swap sides, going under control of your opponent until they get hit again.  Yetis only deal damage to the units directly next to them.

My game group has played this game now a few times and has come to a pretty much unanimous consensus: The game is a a fun, quickly paced short game, but the randomness doesn't leave you really wanting to play it again and again.  The combat mechanic makes it extremely likely you're going to on more than one occasion shoot your own troops, especially those at the left and right of them.  If there was a way to somehow get a little more strategic control of how units were shooting the game would be a bit better for replay value, especially since the artwork on the cards is so fantastic.