Games of November 13th

There are many possible upsets this week, but there are few big time match-ups. Oregon-Cal and Auburn-Georgia both line up as possible upsets, but neither is likely. Because I don't want to just pad my stats, they're good enough anyways, this week we'll be going with what should be even games.

Iowa 29 Northwestern 12

This one shouldn't be close, but it does make me nervous. If the Hawks lose again it'll be a lost season, and I'm on the record as saying the Wildcats get no more wins this season.

Stanford 34 Arizona St 25

I heard the line for this game is 5 points? Somebody should call Uncle Leo and go make some money on it.

Florida 28 South Carolina 20

The Gators? In The Swamp? SEC East champions.

Arizona 32 USC 27

At least with 6 wins the Trojans are bowl eligible. Oh wait...

Utah 29 Notre Dame 23

Nobody cares about Notre Dame anymore.

Lehigh 29 Georgetown 13

Sorry Al. Hoya Saxa?

Last Week: 5-1

This Season: 30-13

Random Chance in Sports

This post is a followup to Random Chance in the NFL which highlighted the lowered competition in the NFL this year. It showed that the best teams win 62% of the time this year, far less than previous years. How often the better team won in previous years and in other sports were still left unknown though. Until now. Here, using the same methodology focusing on variance, here are the data on the last three full seasons in the four major american sports:

	2008	2009	2010
MLB	0.59	0.6	0.59
NBA	0.77	0.77	0.75
NHL	0.56	0.61	0.61
NFL	0.8	0.8	0.78

On average the better team wins 60% of the time in MLB, 77% in the NBA, 60% in the NHL, and 79% in the NFL. But how about this year? How often does the best team win in the NFL this year? It's gotten better since the last look, so far this year in the NFL the better team wins 70% of the time. While this is still an unprecedented increase in parity, it is also slowly getting closer to the norm we'd expect, thanks largely to big losers like the Bills and Panthers. So while this NFL season may have some crazy outcomes, it's still less random than sports like Hockey.

This article originally ran with a bug in the program used to calculate variance. While the effect on previous season results was minimal, it messed with the current season results a lot. The NFL is not actually just random chance this year, although going with just home field advantage would still be pretty good.

The Detroit Lions?

Am I really trying to tell you that the Detroit Lions are the 8th best team in football, even though they're 2-6? I am, and I'll tell you why.

First, they have a positive point differential from barely losing most games, but winning large in their two wins. They've scored 15 points more than their opponents, only two less than the 5-3 Eagles.

Second, they've played one of the hardest schedules in the entire NFL, with only 1 of their 8 opponents having a record below .500 (the Minnesota Vikings). In fact, with an average opponent strength of 1.32 (about the New Orleans Saints) they have played the hardest schedule in the NFL.

Still, with their rating and schedule the Lions should have 4.4 wins. They're easy to see too: one bad call against the Bears, Ndamukong Suh making an extra point against the Jets, and maybe punching in one of the final red zone trips against Green Bay. With 8 game left though, expect the Lions to "suddenly improve" because they'll get better luck eventually.

College Football Top 25 11/7

Many teams with high rankings went down on Saturday (from the Big 12 largely), and there's bound to be some BCS turnover tomorrow. By counting each game equally however, there's less movement in the computer system. Some shifting has happened though, and more notably those on top have widened their gap over the field. Here's this week's top 25:

Rank	Team	W	L	Rating	SOS
1	TCU	10	0	724.84	33.73
2	Oregon	9	0	633.65	45.85
3	Boise St	8	0	580.01	33.61
4	Stanford	8	1	501.54	68.34
5	Alabama	7	2	399.06	66.68
6	Ohio State	8	1	371.95	29.62
7	Nebraska	8	1	259.71	50.98
8	Iowa	7	2	252.53	41.93
9	Missouri	7	2	248.29	60.53
10	Oklahoma St	8	1	239.06	56.87
11	Arkansas	7	2	218.94	58.47
12	Auburn	10	0	217.09	54.04
13	Oklahoma	7	2	213.09	74.68
14	Arizona	7	2	204.63	57.94
15	Texas A&M	6	3	202	64.34
16	Utah	8	1	200.28	31.19
17	Oregon St	4	4	186.47	152.26
18	Florida	6	3	186.29	67.08
19	Southern Cal	6	3	182.39	88.3
20	LSU	8	1	182.38	71.25
21	Florida St	6	3	168.08	46.25
22	Virginia Tech	7	2	166.36	38.74
23	Nevada	8	1	145.55	23.13
24	California	5	4	142.63	68.44
25	South Carolina	6	3	142.56	67.9

TCU has made it clear that they are the nation's number one team, and they've been joined by Oregon and Boise St. in the top three for three consecutive weeks now. Auburn still sits at 12, but will have a chance to show over the next two weeks whether it belongs in the top tier or not. The Stanford Cardinal have also made an impressive showing recently and are again a top 5 team after dominating a good Arizona team.

Other teams of interest:

48

Texas

4

5

62.17

65.09

51

Iowa St

5

5

59.48

79.42

63

Washington

3

6

43.6

171.06

70

Northwestern

6

3

33.93

21.22

415

Georgetown DC

3

6

0.54

0.82

I'm starting to feel bad for Jimmy and his Wildcats. Northwestern had a big lead over Penn State before reality came crashing down on them. They might not win again this year.

How will the BCS look later today? Here's the No MoV top 10:

Rank	Team	W	L	Rating	SOS
1	Auburn	10	0	30.19	7.54
2	LSU	8	1	28.35	9.64
3	TCU	10	0	25.28	6.32
4	Oregon	9	0	24.54	6.13
5	Oklahoma St	8	1	24.16	8.21
6	Boise St	8	0	23.62	5.9
7	Nebraska	8	1	23.25	7.91
8	Stanford	8	1	23.25	7.9
9	Missouri	7	2	21.72	10.05
10	Oklahoma	7	2	19.73	9.13

Auburn will still be atop all of the computer polls, but Oregon has enough of a lead in the human polls to still be number 1. Then it should be TCU, then Boise St. especially with the new voter polls today (somehow TCU's win benefitted Auburn. Voters are way too biased against small conferences). After those top 4, things start to get tricky. LSU should be next, and could actually be in a position to leap frog the two non-AQ teams. Then Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Stanford should be next, but only Nebraska has a real shot of going to the national championship game (it ranks highly in the computer polls, and has could win a high profile Big 12 championship). Once again though, if the season were to end today the best team in the nation would be on the outside looking in.

Games of November 6th

After a spectacular week to finish off October (6-0!!) brought the system's prediction percentage way up on the year. This week brings equally important games though with only a few regular season games left. Here's your winners for this week:

Stanford 30 Arizona 23

One of the nation's best offenses against one of the nation's best defenses. And I'll be sitting in the front row.

Iowa 39 Indiana 15

Iniana still has no D. The Hawks should kick butt, even at Indiana.

TCU 29 Utah 24

I've been saying for a while that TCU's the best team in the country. This is their time to show it.

Penn State 24 Northwestern 11

Northwestern has struggled recently in the Big Ten, and it appears it may continue tomorrow.

Alabama 22 LSU 15

Both of these teams are legitimate title contenders. One of them will go down. It will be LSU.

Oregon 50 Washington 17

This is just to make Stan feel sad.

No Georgetown game this week! Finally I don't have to pick them to lose!

Last week: 6-0

This season: 25-12

NBA Rankings Debut!

Since baseball season is over, I suppose it's time to move on. To the NBA!! Here are the first rankings of the season:

Rank	Team	W	L	Rating	SOS
1	Miami	4	1	9.203	0.872
2	LA Lakers	5	0	6.845	1.17
3	Denver	2	2	5.997	2.12
4	New Orleans	4	0	4.012	1.583
5	Orlando	2	1	3.58	0.978
6	Dallas	3	1	3.055	0.89
7	Boston	4	1	2.023	0.791
8	Houston	0	4	1.668	3.907
9	Atlanta	5	0	1.611	0.491
10	Phoenix	1	3	1.554	1.97
11	Portland	4	2	1.509	0.634
12	San Antonio	3	1	1.476	0.953
13	Golden State	3	1	1.414	1.504
14	New York	2	2	1.234	1.116
15	Memphis	2	3	1.181	1.637
16	Utah	2	2	0.988	1.225
17	Philadelphia	1	4	0.917	0.942
18	Toronto	1	3	0.765	0.684
19	Chicago	2	2	0.664	0.571
20	Sacramento	3	2	0.506	0.676
21	Milwaukee	1	4	0.425	0.932
22	Washington	1	2	0.411	1.742
23	LA Clippers	1	4	0.379	1.248
24	Cleveland	1	3	0.354	1.06
25	Indiana	2	2	0.348	0.733
26	Oklahoma City	3	2	0.315	0.584
27	New Jersey	2	2	0.308	0.666
28	Minnesota	1	4	0.247	1.53
29	Charlotte	1	3	0.233	0.611
30	Detroit	0	5	0.181	0.732

What stands out about these rankings?

First, the ever intriguing Lakers Heat battle starts off actually in favor of the Heat. If they manage to keep this pace up (they won't) it gives them a winning percentage of .913, or 75 wins. Not quite the 78 Hollinger's pythagorean said, but close. The Three MiAmigos (thanks Andy) have done well.

Second, the surprisingly 0-4 Rockets have actually not played terribly, they just had an incredibly hard schedule. It appears Yao could still lead them to the playoffs this year.

Finally, the struggles of the OKC Zombie Sonics should be watched. Maybe all of the hype for such a young team was too much? As with all things this season, only time will tell. And I'm looking forward to it.

Does the best team win the World Series?

Congratulations to the World Champion San Francisco Giants! Here at Kobe, Tell Me How My Stats Taste we've been following the Giants all year, and while we're disappointed that our game 7 tickets now have no value (joining game 5 against the Braves) we're still excited by the outcome.

Some people though (Philllies fans) have expressed doubt that the Giants really were the best team. How often does the best team in baseball win the world series? Let's check it out.

Let's assume that the best team gets to the playoffs (a pretty good assumption).

Next let's assume that there's no home field advantage, because it'd be a pretty even chance that the best team would have the advantage (world series determined by all star game).

As a result, I've created a table, based off the likelihood that the better team wins (calculated similar to the Random Chance in the NFL article).

Chance of Better Winning	Best as Champs
0.55	0.212
0.57	0.257
0.59	0.306
0.61	0.359
0.63	0.415
0.65	0.473

Just a small change makes a big difference, but from the past we've learned that the better team usually wins 60% of the time. That means that the best team wins the world series about 1/3 of the time. So are the Giants really the best team in baseball? Maybe not, but they are World Champions.

Can someone also explain why Renteria and not Lincecum was World Series MVP?