If Kirk doesn't move the goalposts to keep Brian, I'll eat my hat*. I bet instead of 25 ppg, they get to say they scored 25 points in half the games. That's still a reach, but they just need to show a pulse against MSU, Purdue, Minnesota, Northwestern and Illinois or Nebraska and he's safe.
(*Hat eating as serious a promise as firing Brian Feretz)
Maybe a format that would be interesting is rating them like stocks: short, sell, hold, buy. I think rating is as important as trending. Or do it like recruiting, OSU is a five star, but falling in the rankings. Teasing the rating difference between Minnesota, Nebraska, Purdue and Maryland must be difficult.
Iowa should get an award for Rockiest Rock that Ever Rocked. But give them credit for their brilliant strategy of "Let the rest of the Big Ten West implode." It's sort of like medieval doctors. Once they stopped actively draining blood out of sick people, sick people stopped dying in such large numbers.
Seth, as a geek, I see some usefulness of the EPA data. Simple mean/median/mode would give a relative ranking of the performance (a few big plays versus slowly bleeding down the field). It might be useful to see the game-by-game graph of standard deviation as a metric of overall performance.
Seth, if a Raj is off next week too, I'd be honored to fill in if you need someone to keep the seat warm for him. Just call me the third string counterpunter.
As a wolverine living in Lincoln, I've got plenty of material waiting to make a strained analogy about meteor impacts, the battle of Hastings, and or the Simpsons.
I don't understand why Maryland doesn't line up Likely in the slot and at least run some fakes off him. It's not like they've got anything else going on offense. Do they just have Norfleet-itis?
The coaching tenure of these guys is so short, almost nobody gets long enough to see it. I mean, this was Hoke's first year with All His Players. The trend should still be there, if you can truly "coach-up" your players, the performance improvement should be there from the start. That's the idea - you have a known quantity, in this case the recruiting rankings of the players, and can compare them between coaches.
I also figured that with a top-5 recruiting class, the odds would be in your favor of getting some talented freshmen on the field (like Peppers, except for his knee).
It's a combination of two other advanced metrics, FEI and S&P+.
FEI: A scoring rate analysis of the remaining possessions then determines the baseline possession efficiency expectations against which each team is measured. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams, win or lose, and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.
S&P+ takes into account success rate, equivalent points per play, drive efficiency, and adjusts for opponent quality.
I chose it as a way to measure relative success/failure of a team, without using simpler stats like yardage, record, or points. All these advanced stats take those factors and create a ranking from them. I specifically chose F+ since it's a combination of two other advanced stats (like I used 247's aggregate recruiting rankings).
Seth, can you add a line for wins on the graph, so we can see how experience tends to equate with wins? I see 2011 sticking out there, and hopefully that will correlate to exceeding expectations next year.
Yes, the Pep Band needs to play the theme from Alladin if he ever makes it to Ann Arbor.
The KU student government has a good point. If the Michigan student section is around 20,000 seats, at $300 each, that's $6 million in revenue to the AD. The AD has an annual budget of $137.5 million, so giving student tickets away for free would only impact them by less than 5%. Heck, cutting season student ticket prices to $100 for the season would still raise $2 million, impacting budget by less than 2%.
Hypothesis: winning percentage correlates with low foul rates. I'd expect that giving fewer intentional fouls at the end of the game would lead to lower foul rates for good teams.
For example, Saturday's game had 16 fouls for Michigan, 22 for State. Eight of those 22 came in the last two minutes.
Have you ever looked at using other statistical categories for qualification?
I mean, would using median instead of mean (average) influence ranking at all? That would throw out the outlier plays, possibly at the expense of penalizing quick-strike teams.
In a similar vein, would standard deviation serve a similar function to categorize offensive/defensive efficiency? I realize that would reward "grind-it-out" offenses and "bend-but-don't-break" defenses, but categorizing Getting Torched/Homerun play frequency might be interesting.
I guess I didn't expect such a random distrubution of TDs for given yardage. If kicking 40 yards gives a 10% chance of TD, and 50+ is only 25%, then kicking deep doesn't seem like a negative.
it's not very exciting, but I'm curious about the concept of "outkicking the coverage." Specifically, do longer punts give more variance and more chance of a long return? Is there an optimal length of punt to maximize distance and minimize return?
It seems to me that kicking, say, 35 yards and forcing a fair catch is a safer play than punting 50+ and having a potential return for TD. But I'd be curious if the data shows that longer punts are more likely to give up a longer return.
I think the deck is getting stacked to avoid LSU v. Alabama III. Having said that, I do think that the committee will prefer a 4th conference champ over the runner-up from another one, simply for the money going to that conference. And I think that makes it harder for the independants/mid-majors to make it in. I just expect it to be Big-10, SEC, Pac-12, Big-12 more or less every year.
In 2011, the Big 10 would have been shut out of a large pile of money. But I think we'll see a lot of situations like 2010, where I predict that Wisconsin gets in over Stanford, simply because the Pac-10 already has a team in the playoff. Or 2008, where it could very well be Oklahoma, Florida, USC, Penn State just to spread the teams around.
Once the mid-majors combine into a big enough conference to raise enough of a stink is when we'll see the next change (to 6 or 8 teams, or a play-in game or something).
Only because I'm a former hurdler. Anything above high school runs 400m hurdles outdoors. That's why that record has stood for 20+ years - no one runs it in professional competition.
I agree that the "staying ahead of the chains" adage is like "establish the ground game", "win between the tackles", or any number of meaningless announcer-isms. Staying ahead of the chains is only meaningful based on your offensive strategy. If you're playing Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust, then you're expecting 3 plays of 3 or so yards to move the ball. If you're playing Mike Leach's Air Raid, you're expecting 1 play of 10 yards. West Coast/Spread/Run and Shoot fall in between, say, 2 plays of 5 yards to keep moving. I guess it's a way to try and quantify offensive efficiency, but not much else.
Imagine an offense where all you do is throw Hail Mary's. Your success rate would be terrible, but your effectiveness would probably be reasonable (complete 2 or 3 a game, and you've got a shot).
I don't know what happens with baseball/hockey players once they are drafted, aside from the pro team keeping the rights to the player. Do they get a stipend from their team?
But I do think that it does make the college game a noticeable step down from pro games, since the best players are in the pros as soon as they're capable. Compare that to college basketball/football and the skill-level doesn't seem to drop off as much.
I think a position that give some power to the players is best for them. You get a guarenteed 4 or 5 years unless you are ruled ineligible, and are free to leave after any season. I don't know what to do directly about the problem of agents, but maybe this would decrease their demand.
Oklahoma drove down the field to set up the scoring TD. The brought in the aforementioned huge QB (dude looked like a TE), a FB and a TE/H-back. They just plowed into the endzoe to be down one. It looked like Stoops was going to run it again to win, but the offense got a false start called and they kicked to send it into overtime.
I don't know if we have enough huge guys to pull it off, though. Maybe Devin/Hopkins/Koger.
There can be no doubt that the tempo of the offense was a significant reason for poorer performance of the defense in 2010.
1. You ignore special teams totally. Last year we had 4 FGs all season. This year, we have 8 already. That's 12 more points that need to be controlled for. Removing 4 of those to put us on pace with last year gives PPP of 0.508. Otherwise you're attributing the scoring to the offense, which isn't the case.
2. I concede that deleting OT is valid, in that playing with the short field skews the scoring numbers. However, deleting the entire game should not be valid. The first 4 quarters of the game should stand on there own.
3. The season ain't over. If you're want to compare apples to apples, compare 2010 through Purdue to 2011 through Illinois. Also, last year's SOS was higher, so that level of opposition should be controlled for as well.
BTW, turnovers are NOT primarily a matter of just luck but are a result of better performance. Better performing offenses will have fewer turnovers, better performing defenses will force more turnovers.
Here's the turnover rank for the top 20 teams scoring defence from the NCAA:
TO rank
name
59
TCU
26
Boise St.
30
Alabama
49
West Virginia
12
Ohio St.
18
Missouri
45
Iowa
49
UCF
49
Nebraska
12
Stanford
8
LSU
2
Oregon
72
Clemson
36
Northern Ill.
59
Pittsburgh
72
Temple
94
Syracuse
77
Louisville
7
Boston College
No correlation. Ditto for offense (I'll save you the chart). Look at the numbers. Out of 600 to 700 plays, 30 TOs is about 4%. Even if it was 10 TO, it's still 1.5%. It's just too small a factor to matter.
Recent Comments
Wow, PK Yonge Developmental Research School really dropped off after he left.
Also also forgetting Mickey Joseph.
If Kirk doesn't move the goalposts to keep Brian, I'll eat my hat*. I bet instead of 25 ppg, they get to say they scored 25 points in half the games. That's still a reach, but they just need to show a pulse against MSU, Purdue, Minnesota, Northwestern and Illinois or Nebraska and he's safe.
(*Hat eating as serious a promise as firing Brian Feretz)
Maybe a format…
Hey Alex,
Maybe a format that would be interesting is rating them like stocks: short, sell, hold, buy. I think rating is as important as trending. Or do it like recruiting, OSU is a five star, but falling in the rankings. Teasing the rating difference between Minnesota, Nebraska, Purdue and Maryland must be difficult.
Iowa should get an award for Rockiest Rock that Ever Rocked. But give them credit for their brilliant strategy of "Let the rest of the Big Ten West implode." It's sort of like medieval doctors. Once they stopped actively draining blood out of sick people, sick people stopped dying in such large numbers.
Seth, as a geek, I see some usefulness of the EPA data. Simple mean/median/mode would give a relative ranking of the performance (a few big plays versus slowly bleeding down the field). It might be useful to see the game-by-game graph of standard deviation as a metric of overall performance.
Seth, if a Raj is off next week too, I'd be honored to fill in if you need someone to keep the seat warm for him. Just call me the third string counterpunter.
As a wolverine living in Lincoln, I've got plenty of material waiting to make a strained analogy about meteor impacts, the battle of Hastings, and or the Simpsons.
Oregon Whale Explosion would be a great band name. But Nebraska is totally going to get Urban Meyer as their coach, right?
Man, you could have posted the diagram and said "They gonna die" and called it a day. Kudos to you Alex.
Is it too early to start #CannonInTheD watch? (It is never too early)
Oh come on, Seth. Give us a team diagram based on Harbaugh's "depth chart". Two RBs, two TEs, and three WRs.
I mean, Ben Mason + Brandon Graham = Mason Graham. That's how that works, right?
I believe that along the same lines, Alabama wants to play one game and claim the 2020 National Championship title.
#M00PS!
Brian, I am dissapoint.
I don't understand why Maryland doesn't line up Likely in the slot and at least run some fakes off him. It's not like they've got anything else going on offense. Do they just have Norfleet-itis?
I'd consider bringing the Ugly Game of the Week out of retirement for that. Holy moly.
"Drink as much milk as your little belly can hold. At all times"
The coaching tenure of these guys is so short, almost nobody gets long enough to see it. I mean, this was Hoke's first year with All His Players. The trend should still be there, if you can truly "coach-up" your players, the performance improvement should be there from the start. That's the idea - you have a known quantity, in this case the recruiting rankings of the players, and can compare them between coaches.
I also figured that with a top-5 recruiting class, the odds would be in your favor of getting some talented freshmen on the field (like Peppers, except for his knee).
http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fplus
It's a combination of two other advanced metrics, FEI and S&P+.
FEI: A scoring rate analysis of the remaining possessions then determines the baseline possession efficiency expectations against which each team is measured. A team is rewarded for playing well against good teams, win or lose, and is punished more severely for playing poorly against bad teams than it is rewarded for playing well against bad teams.
S&P+ takes into account success rate, equivalent points per play, drive efficiency, and adjusts for opponent quality.
I chose it as a way to measure relative success/failure of a team, without using simpler stats like yardage, record, or points. All these advanced stats take those factors and create a ranking from them. I specifically chose F+ since it's a combination of two other advanced stats (like I used 247's aggregate recruiting rankings).
Seth, can you add a line for wins on the graph, so we can see how experience tends to equate with wins? I see 2011 sticking out there, and hopefully that will correlate to exceeding expectations next year.
where's the Mathlete been? Did he look at our numbers and jump out a (hopefully 1st story) window?
Yes, the Pep Band needs to play the theme from Alladin if he ever makes it to Ann Arbor.
The KU student government has a good point. If the Michigan student section is around 20,000 seats, at $300 each, that's $6 million in revenue to the AD. The AD has an annual budget of $137.5 million, so giving student tickets away for free would only impact them by less than 5%. Heck, cutting season student ticket prices to $100 for the season would still raise $2 million, impacting budget by less than 2%.
Hypothesis: winning percentage correlates with low foul rates. I'd expect that giving fewer intentional fouls at the end of the game would lead to lower foul rates for good teams.
For example, Saturday's game had 16 fouls for Michigan, 22 for State. Eight of those 22 came in the last two minutes.
How to verify this, I have no idea.
Have you ever looked at using other statistical categories for qualification?
I mean, would using median instead of mean (average) influence ranking at all? That would throw out the outlier plays, possibly at the expense of penalizing quick-strike teams.
In a similar vein, would standard deviation serve a similar function to categorize offensive/defensive efficiency? I realize that would reward "grind-it-out" offenses and "bend-but-don't-break" defenses, but categorizing Getting Torched/Homerun play frequency might be interesting.
B1G would be the Big 17, if G was a valid hex code.
WHO WILL BE THE 17th TEAM IN THE BIG TEN???
Why does Braylon get to say who gets AC's #1?
I don't remember needing a jacket.
Wunderground says a high of 71 for January 1, 1998.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBUR/1998/1/1/DailyHistory…?
I guess I didn't expect such a random distrubution of TDs for given yardage. If kicking 40 yards gives a 10% chance of TD, and 50+ is only 25%, then kicking deep doesn't seem like a negative.
it's not very exciting, but I'm curious about the concept of "outkicking the coverage." Specifically, do longer punts give more variance and more chance of a long return? Is there an optimal length of punt to maximize distance and minimize return?
It seems to me that kicking, say, 35 yards and forcing a fair catch is a safer play than punting 50+ and having a potential return for TD. But I'd be curious if the data shows that longer punts are more likely to give up a longer return.
Nothing about Kiffin and USC? Oh, I see...
Travel around, randomly tweeting locations. Make those locations spell the name/logo of your school of choice.
Good
Michigan
Michigan State
Ohio State
Nebraska
Wisconsin
Penn State
Northwestern
Bad
Iowa
Minnesota
Illinois
Indiana
Maryland
Rutgers
This makes the B1G Championship game a formality, and opens the door for promotion/relegation.
There's a number of reasons I quit doing the UGotW.
1. I started to feel bad about picking on EMU every week.
2. I have a whole lot less time to preview/review the games, between a new job and a little future Wolverine
3. The amount of content really picked up, so I felt like there wasn't a big need for one more diary.
4. I wanted to do the Pick Six review, but never heard back from the guy who took all the votes.
5. I can't think of #5.
If there's really a subculture of people who read it (besides me, you and Seth), I will think about bringing it back.
http://www.sbnation.com/authors/brian-cook
is only showing stuff from May/June.
http://www.sbnation.com/users/Brian%20@%20MGoBlog/blog
does work, though.
It just feels like the whole of sbnation is yelling at me.
Have you ever had a +20 EV, let alone almost +0.5 per play?
somebody needs to build these rosters in NCAA '13, build playbooks and let them fight it out.
https://drupal.org/project/chatroll
Their demo site
blog.chatroll.com/demo/drupal
seems like it would do the trick. No idea how well it would scale, but it's an option.
I think the deck is getting stacked to avoid LSU v. Alabama III. Having said that, I do think that the committee will prefer a 4th conference champ over the runner-up from another one, simply for the money going to that conference. And I think that makes it harder for the independants/mid-majors to make it in. I just expect it to be Big-10, SEC, Pac-12, Big-12 more or less every year.
In 2011, the Big 10 would have been shut out of a large pile of money. But I think we'll see a lot of situations like 2010, where I predict that Wisconsin gets in over Stanford, simply because the Pac-10 already has a team in the playoff. Or 2008, where it could very well be Oklahoma, Florida, USC, Penn State just to spread the teams around.
Once the mid-majors combine into a big enough conference to raise enough of a stink is when we'll see the next change (to 6 or 8 teams, or a play-in game or something).
Only because I'm a former hurdler. Anything above high school runs 400m hurdles outdoors. That's why that record has stood for 20+ years - no one runs it in professional competition.
But that's still a pretty good time.
"Raping their fanbase" is probably not appropriate when discussing Penn State.
I would have thought it sounds much more like the Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Personally, Seth's looks the best to me, but if you average them together you get:
I can confirm this statement is true.
But I don't think Michigan v. ND UTL should count as Random Michigan game, but point taken.
I agree that the "staying ahead of the chains" adage is like "establish the ground game", "win between the tackles", or any number of meaningless announcer-isms. Staying ahead of the chains is only meaningful based on your offensive strategy. If you're playing Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust, then you're expecting 3 plays of 3 or so yards to move the ball. If you're playing Mike Leach's Air Raid, you're expecting 1 play of 10 yards. West Coast/Spread/Run and Shoot fall in between, say, 2 plays of 5 yards to keep moving. I guess it's a way to try and quantify offensive efficiency, but not much else.
Imagine an offense where all you do is throw Hail Mary's. Your success rate would be terrible, but your effectiveness would probably be reasonable (complete 2 or 3 a game, and you've got a shot).
Looking forward to some numbers.
but how are his hips?
I always wondered what a Biz Markee and Wesley Willis duet would sound like. Now I know.
I don't know what happens with baseball/hockey players once they are drafted, aside from the pro team keeping the rights to the player. Do they get a stipend from their team?
But I do think that it does make the college game a noticeable step down from pro games, since the best players are in the pros as soon as they're capable. Compare that to college basketball/football and the skill-level doesn't seem to drop off as much.
I think a position that give some power to the players is best for them. You get a guarenteed 4 or 5 years unless you are ruled ineligible, and are free to leave after any season. I don't know what to do directly about the problem of agents, but maybe this would decrease their demand.
Oklahoma drove down the field to set up the scoring TD. The brought in the aforementioned huge QB (dude looked like a TE), a FB and a TE/H-back. They just plowed into the endzoe to be down one. It looked like Stoops was going to run it again to win, but the offense got a false start called and they kicked to send it into overtime.
I don't know if we have enough huge guys to pull it off, though. Maybe Devin/Hopkins/Koger.
1. You ignore special teams totally. Last year we had 4 FGs all season. This year, we have 8 already. That's 12 more points that need to be controlled for. Removing 4 of those to put us on pace with last year gives PPP of 0.508. Otherwise you're attributing the scoring to the offense, which isn't the case.
2. I concede that deleting OT is valid, in that playing with the short field skews the scoring numbers. However, deleting the entire game should not be valid. The first 4 quarters of the game should stand on there own.
3. The season ain't over. If you're want to compare apples to apples, compare 2010 through Purdue to 2011 through Illinois. Also, last year's SOS was higher, so that level of opposition should be controlled for as well.
Here's the turnover rank for the top 20 teams scoring defence from the NCAA:
No correlation. Ditto for offense (I'll save you the chart). Look at the numbers. Out of 600 to 700 plays, 30 TOs is about 4%. Even if it was 10 TO, it's still 1.5%. It's just too small a factor to matter.