Why College Football?
It is good to have something to discuss in 2020, other than conspiracy theories, Tiger King, brands of division and pre-existing conditions. This is a year in which being asymptomatic would have been a solid New Year’s resolution, looking back on it, or at the very least spending more time gardening. Where I live, the indisputable top thing to happen this year was the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl, and second place is probably that the Chiefs started another season. Third place may very well involve a successful toilet paper acquisition, so Chiefs then, we discuss the Chiefs. And yet here I am, the guy trying to insert college football into the discussion, even though the team I regularly go to Lawrence to see has won about the same amount of games in the last decade as the Chiefs won last year.
So that’s the question I most often get when I try to discuss this stuff. But what about the NFL? Can I apply my system to the NFL? The short answer is no, not at all, but to get there, a little background is in order, and the thing to know is that the place I am coming from never would have involved football in the first place, as it is not my passion. Actually, there have been times in my life where years were divided into 2, basketball season and baseball season, and football took on the role of just another background interest, not unlike other things I might pick up in life, such as cycling or gardening, or some show I might stream whenever it occurs to me. The reasons for this aren’t that difficult to explain, and the primary contributor is undoubtedly that basketball and baseball are the sports I actively participated in the most growing up, and thus the two that I can most adequately explain things like mechanics and strategy and defensive sets, particularly basketball, in which I have logged the most hours of participation, an exhaustive amount of it actually from my pre-teen years until my early twenties, particularly for a young man of my notably lacking athleticism.
But when it comes to passion, baseball takes the cake. I could make quite a list as to why, just as it seems everyone who has ever caught the bug could probably do the same, and many reasons would be ubiquitous to every list. I have the all-American stories, the dad taking me to the ballpark, the hours with my brother in the backyard, various all-star game appearances, oiling and breaking in the glove, the times dragging the baseball bat along the sidewalk on my way to playing ball with my friends and a hometown Royals team that at one point could be counted on to be good every year. Those memories are both timeless and priceless, and I cherish them, but for me somewhere near the top would be something that might not make every list, and it is that baseball is the motherload of statistical analysis. And it gets this distinction, not just by all the things in baseball we can count, but also because of how much of each we have available; the sample size is unparalleled by any other sport. Just the other day, I had a guy telling me that he thought MLB should play every season with only 60 games like they were forced to do this year, and if he didn’t recognize the indignation in my voice, then I feel like I need to give myself a lot of credit for remaining calm in such a situation. It’s deeply personal. I taught myself long division at a very young age because I wanted to fully understand the stats on the back of my baseball cards, so we’re talking about a lifetime interest of mine, and it’s all worthless without sample size.
Football then, is the antithesis of baseball, when it comes to sample size. or at least it seemed. Do you want 12 college games, 14 max, 16 NFL games, 20 games max, or do you want the minimum of 162 games per team that baseball offers when you want to find something projectible in sports? Honestly, I would have been happy to go on plowing through all those baseball stats like I do for the rest of my life, and left football for about 7 Saturdays in Lawrence and a pretty fun bowl contest I play with my friends every year, had it not dawned on me at some point that what baseball has in hoards regarding games played, college football has in teams. Boom. There’s your sample size. About 130 teams playing at the FBS level should suffice, it dawned on me one day, and the difference between the best team and number 130 is immense, meaning everyone else is somewhere in between. And besides college basketball, which has so many games that I couldn’t possibly find time for an endeavor such as this in that landscape (which I may still try someday anyway), college football uniquely gave me the opportunity to dive into a very large sample, if I could just approach it in another way, total teams playing instead of total games played. And so that’s what I set out to do.
The difficult part, of course, was putting the teams to scale, not only the margins you separate each team by, but also how you apply it to point spreads, which once again, I’m going to push back to another week, as this was a large enough task that it might require a couple of posts by itself. But what’s important so far, as I look at my discouraging 9-17 start, is that I am not playing with the full deck of teams that I once signed up for, the very premise that spawned this journey in the first place. That will come in a couple of weeks as all of the absent conferences join the pack, sans 3 teams, New Mexico State, Connecticut and Old Dominion. The other factor, however, is the part I keep reminding myself still matters, and that is total games played. Looking back on last season, for example, I found a stretch of picks that went 3-9 and a couple others of similar misfortune, these in a season in which my system finished with a 111-79 record, good for 58.4%. I’m not going to get to that amount of total games this year, this I know, but I’m still hopeful that I can turn this season around. In fact, I expect to.
This might take a bit though, as this week the system is still only offering 6 games to play. They are:
Florida -7 on the road vs Texas A&M
South Carolina -13 on the road vs Vanderbilt
Virginia -7.5 at home vs North Carolina State
Syracuse +2.5 at home vs Duke
Georgia -12.5 at home vs Tennessee
Florida International -4 at home vs Middle Tennessee
I’m also tracking Oklahoma again, which the system is willing to give up one solitary point to take against Texas, as well as Louisiana Tech if the spread drops to -12.5 against UTEP. So listen, my plan is to keep writing about this project well beyond the pandemic days we’re in right now, but it’s important for me to thank you for sticking with me up until now in this weird season, as I know the results have been infuriating and have not exactly inspired confidence. Thank you for reading anyway. No, really, thank you.
