First, though, we sadly have our first DEFINITELY out; the parabola has hit the x-axis, not even 5-7 and hope not enough qualify eliminated teams. Unless something I have never seen before happens, our first eliminated teams are:
Also sad is that none of these teams are strangers to going bowless. Poor Bowl-less bastards....maybe next year guys.
Next, are those teams who would have to win out and hope not enough teams qualify; something that's only happened once, that I know of.
Next, are those teams who would have to win out and hope not enough teams qualify; something that's only happened once, that I know of.
Last week I made note that Northwestern still had a good percentage despite only having one more allowable slip-up. After last weekend's loss, Northwestern is down to zero margins for error and their percent chance of making a bowl went from 11ish% to close to 3% which is still pretty high considering they would have to win out. Just under 3% for Northwestern seems generous when compared with other teams in this subset that have to win out too but have to win fewer games. Only UTEP has five games they have to win in a row to eeek into a bowl. In fact, Northwestern's chances are higher than all others here save for UNLV.
Sidenote, happy to hear former Nebraska Assistant Coach and now Head Coach at UNLV Barney Cotton successfully underwent Heart Transplant surgery. So glad to hear that!
As with most distributions, the vast majority lie in the middle, I would wager to guess with the addition of non-conference games resulting in not ever D1 win results in a D1 loss. To put it another way, in the NFL if one team wins another must lose except for the stupid possibility of a tie which somehow still exists in almost the year 2020. Therefore if you add up all the wins and all the losses they should equal the total number of games. I use this to my advantage to double-check stats for all of my own football leagues win-loss records.
Since D1 teams are allowed to play D1-AA teams these wins don't come at the expense of another team (in this case a 1-AA) that are competing for a bowl spot. Therefore I would expect the win hill to be pushed forward a bit.
Maybe that made sense, maybe that didn't but I'm listening to some pretty trippy YouTube music and if you listen for a while I think you would at least forgive my mindset.
Okay, hills aside, these teams mostly need two more wins, and in most cases can still handle one more slip up:
Our first wide range of percentages, from Middle Tennessee's 65ish % all the way down to Vandy's paltry .7 percent. I hate to keep banging the Northwestern drum but despite having to win out Northwestern would be between Mississippi and East Carolina here who both have three times as many wins as the Northwestern Wildcats. That was the last time I'll mention Northwestern, I promise.
At this point, I must admit that I'm self-conscious about both the short term, this blog, and the long term, this series of blogs. I worry about that the sheer amount of numbers and percentages will become boring and that over time this blog could end up just being headings "These are the teams that are 3 games out" then a list, then "These are the teams two games out..." and so forth. Not sure what if anything I'm going to do about this, not even sure why I felt the need to share, but I put that out there.
Teams with two wins, or losses depending on your view of the world:
The above set also surprises me in that I expected to see an equal or relatively equal amount of 4-4 and 4-3 teams, but there are only three 4-3 teams.
Our range here has slightly increased too, comprising a spectrum of 74.6%. I feel like I should be pushing black glasses with white tape between the lenses up the bridge of my nose when I say that, again, not sure why I felt the need to share but I'm gonna own it.
Next, are the teams who are only one win away:
Last week I made a big deal about there still being a possibility that Notre Dame could lose out and miss a bowl, the opposite of the teams I already talked about who is listed at zero even though there is still a very slim chance they could make a bowl. Well, Notre Dame lost and they stayed at 100%. I'd have to go back and look but I believe Louisiana Lafayette won their way into almost certain bowls. They also lead the NCAA in the coolest and fitting name "The Ragin' Cajuns".
If we were talking coin flips we would say roughly 50% of these teams would be bowl eligible by next week, I'm thinking that number will be slightly higher. I have no fancy numbers to back that up, even in this statistically heavy blog I still reserve the right to have hunches.
Back to the numbers, the range is once again smaller as we find ourselves on the other side of the distribution hill I tried to describe earlier.
*= Missouri was naughty and is bowl banned.
The list below is the teams that are in. I put them in alphabetical order because their percents are, all the same, they're in.
Really the only interesting thing for me here is their number, 31 total teams. For our purposes there are effectively 39 Bowls, yes I know technically they are 40, but the 40th is comprised of the winners of two other bowls and is the National Championship, so in a sense that bowl is paradoxically both TBD and already accounted for at the same time.
So we have 31 of the 78 spots spoken for. There are more than just Missouri exceptions, I learned that some teams have to get to seven wins to become eligible either because they played thirteen regular-season games like Hawaii, or they played two 1-AA teams. I figure TeamRankings.com was smart enough to account for this so I didn't mess with the numbers. A number greater than 78 would mean we have teams for my "Nebraska Bowl", "Blog Bowl" or "Smitty Bowl" whatever I decide to call it. This was mentioned in my last blog and I almost forgot about it.
The last set of data is the greatest gainers/losers of bowl eligibility, I was hoping to have a sort of "Bowl Watchers Guide" that had the percentages for games this weekend, but as of writing this, I ran out of time. Hopefully, in the future, I will be able to do this.
First note, I took out any teams that netted a 0% difference as they are boring and stupid and no one cares. Otherwise as one would expect the greatest gainers and losers at both extremes are interesting here.
So we have 31 of the 78 spots spoken for. There are more than just Missouri exceptions, I learned that some teams have to get to seven wins to become eligible either because they played thirteen regular-season games like Hawaii, or they played two 1-AA teams. I figure TeamRankings.com was smart enough to account for this so I didn't mess with the numbers. A number greater than 78 would mean we have teams for my "Nebraska Bowl", "Blog Bowl" or "Smitty Bowl" whatever I decide to call it. This was mentioned in my last blog and I almost forgot about it.
The last set of data is the greatest gainers/losers of bowl eligibility, I was hoping to have a sort of "Bowl Watchers Guide" that had the percentages for games this weekend, but as of writing this, I ran out of time. Hopefully, in the future, I will be able to do this.
Right away I'm wondering if I did something wrong because East Carolina lost to South Florida. The only thing I can think of is that that they were given such a low probability to win that game that it was weighing their overall percentage down? That doesn't make sense though as I just don't see that sizable a gap between South Florida and East Carolina. I probably screwed something up here, so we're going to move on to Illinois.
Illinois makes more sense as going into the season Purdue was supposed to make waves and Illinois wasn't, by beating Purdue they got an unexpected win and now find themselves two games away from bowl eligibility. Purdue on the other hand understandingly fell by double digits and find themselves in the "Win Out" category.
Moving towards the opposite end of the list Eastern Michigan 84% drop has to be looked into further, as even the next closest drop is 40 percentage points off.
No, I don't see much special about losing to Toledo in overtime. Perhaps a key player got hurt? Perhaps other factors go into TeamRankings.com's special sauce that I don't know about? The fact that both puzzling extremes absolute value is very close (84ish) is probably just a coincidence but at the very least I felt like mentioning it.
South Carolina's 40% drop is more understandable, Tennessee lost to a 1-AA team and has struggled mightily all season, Tennessee, therefore, was most likely a high probability of winning and being counted on for South Carolina to put together six wins.
Thank you for reading this, hopefully, next week things can be streamlined even further, perhaps just a list of gainers and losers after noting the teams that joined the ranks of the bowl eligible and the definitely not.
No comments:
Post a Comment