|
Articles
|
Tree topples Troy: a Yankees kind of thing Statistics restore some sanity Richard Linde, 8 October 2007
Does that mean statistics in college football are worthless? Well, sometimes they are helpful; in the case of the Tree's 24-23 victory over Troy, the notion of a limited football season, 12 or 13 games played, restores some sanity to the process of putting the game in its proper prospective. In other words, these things happen, and over a much longer football season, we would expect upsets such as this to occur. They would be the norm, not the exception. College football's elite would all suffer multiple losses over a longer football season -- alas, and to some of the weakest opponents. You might not stub your toe every time you climb into bed, but sometime, over the course of days, weeks or years, you will. Playing a limited schedule means that too much emphasis is placed on the occurrence of what seems to be a major upset in college football. Also, a look at the raw data on the season suggested beforehand that the Tree/Troy game would be closer than the bookies' 40-point spread. But raw data aren't the whole answer to the upset, as we well know. At times, statistics that predict victories surrender to human emotions and fate. Enthusiasm, emotion, discipline and focus are unmeasured variables that can be used to explain Stanford's upset of USC. Add your own reasons here -- like overconfidence on the part of Troy, maybe an injury here or there, being out-coached, and so on. Playing a limited schedule is a "Yankees kind of thing." Sportswriters and fans tend to get carried away with upsets in football, failing to put them in their proper perspective. No one would think anything of the New York Yankees, a perennial major league powerhouse, getting off to a 6-6 start on the season and being beaten by the worst teams in the league. Or even if the Yanks should lose 6-straight games somewhere in mid-season. College football doesn't play enough games in a season to diminish the value of an upset. Upsets factor too heavily in the rankings; the paucity of games in college football is another good reason to have a playoff system for determining a national champion. But is that even enough? According to physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in order to guarantee that the best team in baseball actually wins the World Series teams would need to play 256 games per team, well beyond the 162 games each Major League Baseball team currently plays in the regular season. "According to the physicists' analysis and simulations of league play, there is always at least some chance that a lesser team can prevail in any given game." [networkworld.com]. The Tree's humbling of Troy is one good reason to be looking at raw statistics though. The stat involving Turnover Margin has haunted the Trojans over their last few games. Going into the Washington game, the one before Stanford, USC ranked 85th in the country. They ended up minus-1 on the game with Washington, a 27-24 win, and minus-4 on the game with Stanford. Currently, the Trojans rank 106th in the country in Turnover Margin, having turned the ball over 14 times while pulling off just 7 thefts themselves. They also rank last in the conference in incurring penalties. In their last two games the Trojans have lost 241 yards to the zebras. On a personal level, I feel that the lack of mobility at the quarterback position has come home to roost for the Trojans, and is their most glaring weakness, along with injuries on the offensive line that have affected the running game. Are the surging Cardinal going to win the conference this season? Nope, its not in the cards. The men from the farm have the worst stats in the league. But that doesn't mean Stanford can't pull off another upset, a Yankees kind of thing. According to our 11-stat comparator (see the table below), four teams are clearly positioned at the top of the Pacific-10 conference: Arizona State, USC, Oregon, and California. According to these same stats, UCLA and Oregon State are clearly in the middle of the conference. Oregon State leads the country in rushing defense and is second in the country in sacks, this in a conference that isn't supposed to play defense. Separated by one and one half points, WSU, Arizona and Washington are the penultimate three teams, with Stanford definitively at the bottom. In our 11-stat comparator, Washington has an
average national ranking of 65.6, out of 119 Division I-A teams, Although ASU has played a soft schedule, it did beat Colorado which beat then number-three-ranked Oklahoma. But then again you could say that upset was a Yankees kind of thing. You know, this stuff happens, a quirk of fate determined by other variables not statically minded. Strength of schedule is another factor not weighed by statistics, especially with respect to comparing teams from different conferences. In the table below, both LSU and Ohio State rank considerably better than any team in the Pac-10. They rank 1 and 3, respectively, in the AP poll, while Cal is number 2. However, if we massage the Trojans' statistics and enter a 23 for Turnover Margin, which is their average ranking for their other 10 statistics, their overall average ranking changes to 23, which correlates with LSU's and tOSU's statistical ranking. Turning Turnover Margin into a positive number is the Trojans' most pressing need. In our Boise State preview, we noted that the Broncos had an average national ranking of 14.1 compared with Washington's 77.1, these numbers based on our 11-stat comparator for the 2006 season. We suggested that the figures needed some sort of Pac-10/WAC normalization, considering the Broncos 2-8 record against Pac-10 teams? UW ended up beating Boise State 24-10. According to my Directv guide, the UW/ASU game will be broadcast by by Comcast SportsNet (channel 640). Last week, Comcast provided television coverage for the WSU/ASU game in high definition, a game that I watched on my HD TV. I am assuming that the UW game on Saturday will be broadcast in HD on channel 640. If you don't have the proper hardware, channel 640 won't even appear on your Directv channel guide. You will need the big dish to catch the birds, a B-Band converter, along with an MPEG-4 set top box, an HD20 DVR, for example. Table. 11-stat comparator. The following statistics give the national ranking number for each team in the conference as it compares with the 119 teams in NCAA Division I-A football. For example Washington ranks 93rd in the nation out of 119 teams in Total Offense. RO=Rushing Offense, RD=Rushing Defense, PEO=Pass Efficiency Offense, PED=Pass Efficiency Defense, SO=Scoring Offense, SD=Scoring Defense, SF=Sacks For, SA=Sacks allowed, and TM=Turnover Margin.
Malamute can be reached at malamute@4malamute.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Everyone
remembers the story about the man who drowned in a stream that
had an average depth of six inches. Then there is the other statistical
bromide that says: "Torture numbers, and they will
confess to anything."