Week 2: Full Rankings -- TFG

Biggest jumps: Michigan (0.110); Baylor (0.082); Florida St. (0.061); Bowling Green (0.059); Utah St. (0.058)

Biggest drops: Western Michigan (-0.104); Idaho (-0.065); Auburn (-0.061); Tulsa (-0.060); LA-Monroe (-0.051)

Full rankings after the jump.

Week 2: Top 25 -- TFG

Through games of Saturday, September 4th.

The first week is in the books, and the rankings are slowly adjusting to teams from this year. Let's see what they have to say so far.

Rank	+/-	Team	WinPct	SoS		Adjusted
						Off.		Def.		Pace
1	+3	Ohio St.	0.938	0.450	83	26.6	12	9.0	1	161.0	100
2	+1	Alabama	0.934	0.587	30	29.4	5	10.2	2	158.2	113
3	-1	Boise St.	0.925	0.480	68	29.3	7	10.7	3	165.9	58
4	-3	TCU	0.888	0.472	74	29.7	3	13.0	9	163.2	80
5	+1	Stanford	0.882	0.496	61	30.3	1	13.6	11	162.3	88
6	+1	Oklahoma	0.881	0.599	24	25.0	18	11.2	4	183.4	2
7	+2	LSU	0.864	0.683	2	29.1	8	13.9	12	158.3	112
8	+3	Florida	0.860	0.576	35	26.5	13	12.9	7	161.1	99
9	-1	Virginia Tech	0.853	0.595	26	29.4	6	14.6	19	157.2	117
10	-5	Oregon	0.838	0.655	6	25.7	16	13.3	10	185.3	1
11	+6	Florida St.	0.826	0.569	41	26.3	15	14.1	14	160.3	105
12	+1	Iowa	0.819	0.587	29	23.1	24	12.6	6	162.3	89
13	-1	Arkansas	0.804	0.663	3	28.9	9	16.4	31	168.0	44
14	--	Wisconsin	0.781	0.490	66	30.1	2	18.1	50	157.6	115
15	--	Nebraska	0.780	0.509	59	23.6	23	14.2	15	160.4	104
16	+2	Missouri	0.774	0.519	55	19.9	52	12.2	5	171.2	29
17	-7	Auburn	0.774	0.626	14	29.6	4	18.1	51	165.9	59
18	+1	West Virginia	0.756	0.545	49	20.3	47	12.9	8	161.7	92
19	+1	South Carolina	0.734	0.642	9	26.4	14	17.6	39	159.9	108
20	+3	Georgia	0.732	0.689	1	27.1	10	18.1	48	156.1	120
21	-5	Oklahoma St.	0.728	0.472	73	25.2	17	17.0	36	180.8	4
22	NA	Miami-FL	0.721	0.648	8	21.2	40	14.5	17	170.7	31
23	-1	Utah	0.716	0.477	69	23.1	25	16.0	30	161.5	94
24	NA	North Carolina St.	0.704	0.613	20	22.4	28	15.8	29	172.1	25
25	-4	Notre Dame	0.703	0.597	25	19.9	53	14.1	13	172.2	23

New entries: Miami-FL, North Carolina St..

Dropped out: Pittsburgh, USC.

What's that? Miami loses and enters the top 25? Auburn wins and drops 7 spots? Ohio State as the overall number one?? What kind of crazy talk is this?

The first thing to do is step back and take a deep breath. Last week's games only account for about one-sixth of the overall rankings; the rest rely on last year's data, and will slowly be phased out as this year continues. Second, note up at the very top that these rankings only include games through Saturday. As far as the computer knows, Miami has yet to blow it against Maryland and their technicolor uniforms, West Virginia and Marshall haven't faced the wrath of God, and a certain ESPN personality hadn't watched his alma mater get steamrolled by Texas A&M.

Auburn's drop should be less controversial, mainly because they played a dismal game against an inferior opponent. Some people have asked why Boise State gets lauded when they beat Utah State, but Auburn gets punished when they win. The short answer is: margin of victory. Since Boise started playing Utah State regularly in 2006, the Broncos have never won by fewer than 24 points, and average a five touchdown margin of victory. Auburn, on the other hand, needed an onside kick and a last-minute questionable touchdown call in order to eek out the victory. It's not like this is anything new for Auburn, but they got dinged because they did it against clearly inferior opposition instead of in a national title game.

Also moving downwards was TCU; when your rank depends on your rock-solid defense, giving up 50 points to Baylor is going to hurt you just a bit. Florida State, Florida, Alabama, and LSU all moved in the right direction thanks to either a good win against top competition (LSU) or an absolute thrashing of a mid-level patsy (everyone else).

The rankings will need another two or three weeks to really start making sense for the 2011 season, but until then keep an eye out for our Tuesday Trivia feature and game-day predictions.

Tuesday Trivia: The State of Parity

Welcome to the first regular Tuesday Trivia feature, in which we examine the state of parity in college football. A quick Google search for "college football parity" yields a range of articles, from mainstream sports journalists to hand-wringing partisans to bloggers all discussing the effect of reduced scholarships and other rules changes on parity. There are a few high-profile upsets and recurring underdogs that make waves, but are these a sign of real change or just flashes in the pan as many naysayers claim (there's even a whole Facebook group devoted to the notion that Boise State is overrated).

Before we can really discuss whether parity is changing, though, we first need to define it. Is it the number of different teams at the top? Is it the odds that a lesser team could defeat a top-tier team? Is it a snapshot across all of Division I Football Bowl Series (FBS) teams? Let's look at a few sets of standings and try to establish a definition of parity.

League 1: Top Dog and Small Pack

Rank	Team	WinPct
1	Adams	0.800
2	Boston	0.500
3	Chicago	0.400
3	Denver	0.400
3	Frank	0.400

Here we have one clear front-runner (Adams) one middling team (Boston) and three mediocre teams that are all tied. Adams is clearly going to win the majority of titles, but at the same time even the lowest teams have a not-reasonable shot at winning; log5 says any of the bottom 3 have roughly a 1-in-6 shot of winning.

League 2: Top Dogs and Whipping Boys

Rank	Team	WinPct
1	Adams	0.750
1	Boston	0.750
1	Chicago	0.750
4	Denver	0.125
4	Frank	0.125

In this scenario we have a trio of powerhouses and a pair of whipping boys. Any of the 3 teams at the top could win, but the bottom-feeders have an unrealistic 1-in-22 shot of winning; as a point of reference, the infamous Stanford-over-USC upset that topped a previous Tuesday Trivia edition was a 1-in-22 upset.

League 3: Center-heavy

Rank	Team	WinPct
1	Adams	0.750
2	Boston	0.500
2	Chicago	0.500
2	Denver	0.500
5	Frank	0.250

In this league we have three exceedingly average teams, one good team, and one bad team. The top team has a 3-in-4 shot of winning against the middle of the pack, but a 9-in-10 shot against the bottom feeder.

Which one of these leagues has the most parity and which has the least? League 1 has a large blob of mid-level talent that will make for some interesting games, and even the top team won't have any easy games. League 2 has a very clear delineation between the haves and the have-nots. League 3 has a clear front-runner, but it also has a whipping boy that gives teams a game off. My personal gut reaction would be to say that league 1 represents the most league with the most parity, followed very closely by league 3, and league 2 with the least equitable distribution of talent.

That's my gut, but how to quantify that? The measure of parity I'm proposing here actually a measure of disparity; we use the standard deviation of the winning percentages, where a lower value of disparity represents a greater amount parity in the sport. Here's how it looks with our sample leagues:

League	Disparity
1	0.086
3	0.088
2	0.171

These values confirm the gut feeling of leagues 1 and 3 having a lower levels of disparity, whereas league 2 has a clear division of talent.  But what does it look like when we apply this formula to all of FBS at large over the last nine seasons?

Even given our small sample size we can see a small yet decreasing disparity in overall talent in the league. The downward trend is slow, but explains nearly 40% of the variance in the distribution of winning percentages. In layman's terms this means that there is certainly an observable and significant decrease in the overall unequal distribution of talent in the league, but it isn't quite as drastic as some observers would have us believe.

We'll continue to see occasional upsets of top talent by underdogs, but we should be careful to not read too much into these individual events. With over 700 games between FBS teams per year, even a one-in-a-hundred event is bound to happen a few times over the course of a single season, and one-in-a-thousand upsets will occur nearly every year. As to which upsets are fluke occurrences as opposed to a sign of something more fundamental is left as an exercise to the reader.

Are You Smarter Than a Computer?

At Tempo Free Gridiron, we like to challenge the sensibility of human rankings and predictions. This doesn't necessarily endear us to a certain subset of humans who think that we're completely full of it, particularly as it relates to highly ranked non-AQ teams. Honestly, we're curious how well we pick games relative to the human population, so we'd like to invite TFG readers to a pick'em versus the computers. There are no prizes. However, we promise to post weekly updates to the blog and admit right here in front of everyone which of you managed to beat us over the course of the season.

Week 1: Saturday Predictions

The first 10 or so games are under our belt, and now it's time to move on to the main course. Starting next week we'll be moving on to a full look at several key matchups, but as of right now there's not too much to say since all of our data is based on last year's standings. Most of these wouldn't be too competitive no matter which year they were played -- hello Kent State at Alabama -- but in a few other instances it'd be useful to have more info about this year's teams -- we're looking at you, Boise State versus Georgia.

Now, presented without further commentary, are the first batch of predictions for the 2011-2012 college football season.

Home			Visitors			Home			Visitors
3	Alabama	42	100	Kent St.	18	3	Alabama	45	98	Kent St.	3
10	Auburn	48	97	Utah St.	25	7	Auburn	49	108	Utah St.	17
105	Ball St.	32	90	Indiana	35	104	Ball St.	28	87	Indiana	31
2	Boise St.	38	23	Georgia	29	5	Boise St.	38	21	Georgia	20
58	Boston College	30	71	Northwestern	24	65	Boston College	31	72	Northwestern	20
69	Fresno St.	31	45	California	34	73	Fresno St.	27	49	California	31
34	Clemson	35	68	Troy	26	37	Clemson	41	81	Troy	20
74	East Carolina	30	20	South Carolina	41	77	East Carolina	24	19	South Carolina	38
17	Florida St.	44	109	LA-Monroe	23	16	Florida St.	41	102	LA-Monroe	7
11	Florida	43	113	FL-Atlantic	20	18	Florida	56	NA	FL-Atlantic	3
56	Hawaii	38	80	Colorado	30	62	Hawaii	35	67	Colorado	27
63	Houston	36	78	UCLA	29	68	Houston	34	66	UCLA	27
40	Illinois	39	88	Arkansas St.	27	35	Illinois	41	90	Arkansas St.	21
9	LSU	33	5	Oregon	34	11	LSU	29	4	Oregon	28
62	Michigan	35	67	Western Michigan	30	54	Michigan	45	85	Western Michigan	17
59	Mississippi	33	38	BYU	32	58	Mississippi	31	56	BYU	27
18	Missouri	37	89	Miami-OH	22	22	Missouri	38	93	Miami-OH	10
120	New Mexico St.	30	83	Ohio	36	117	New Mexico St.	21	82	Ohio	34
116	New Mexico	34	112	Colorado St.	32	118	New Mexico	24	107	Colorado St.	27
30	Northern Ill.	40	84	Army	27	55	Northern Ill.	38	79	Army	17
21	Notre Dame	32	49	South Florida	25	25	Notre Dame	31	44	South Florida	20
4	Ohio St.	47	119	Akron	16	6	Ohio St.	62	119	Akron	0
16	Oklahoma St.	48	110	LA-Lafayette	24	17	Oklahoma St.	52	113	LA-Lafayette	14
7	Oklahoma	42	47	Tulsa	29	8	Oklahoma	48	59	Tulsa	17
24	Pittsburgh	39	114	Buffalo	20	30	Pittsburgh	59	115	Buffalo	7
82	Purdue	32	96	Middle Tenn.	26	78	Purdue	34	NA	Middle Tenn.	20
25	USC	38	70	Minnesota	27	31	USC	38	83	Minnesota	20
60	Southern Miss.	39	79	LA Tech	31	57	Southern Miss.	38	86	LA Tech	24
6	Stanford	49	115	SJSU	20	1	Stanford	52	111	SJSU	6
33	Texas	44	98	Rice	26	32	Texas	45	101	Rice	17

Key
Close game							Certain victory

The 2011-2012 Tempo-Free Gridiron

Normally around this time I'd be writing a post about the changes I've made to my system over the last year and how those will affect the rankings and predictions for the coming year. I say "normally" because even though I've done that periodically over the last two years, generally the TFG predictor has done well enough to stay just ahead of Eddie's RBA system. With success comes a degree of complacency, but that complacency has allowed me to go through and automate a lot of the day-to-day running of the blog by generating the predictions, rankings, and projections, and uploading that to the blog for the final tweaks.

Besides, it's fun to watch Eddie fume and rage about trying to wipe the grin off my face.

Instead during the off-season I spent most of my efforts trying to support the massive amount of content we're planning to churn out this coming season. A basic overhaul of the blog, better weekly projections, more informative rankings, complete per-conference projections, integration with our Twitter feed, improved game selection for our not one but two pick'ems (both for TotalFark members and for the public at large), an upcoming countdown of the best BCS champions of the last decade, a regular look at the remaining undefeated teams (as opposed to the occasional glance last year), and more behind-the-scenes work on making it easier for us to get this information to you.

So while I've been busy contributing to the common good here, Eddie's been focused on himself and flailing around trying to catch up to me. I'm not worried just yet, and probably won't be until near the end of the year. After all, last year he started out strong, only to flag down the home stretch.

Maybe in the meantime I can start putting together predictions for that other football league.

Week 1: Mid-Week Predictions

So here we are with the first predictions of the new football season. Just a reminder that all the rankings here are the same as they were at the end of last year; they'll slowly start to adjust as our computers get data from this year. Given that, it's a little difficult to predict this first week or so, but we're still putting it out there. Also remember that we only examine games between two Division I (FBS) schools, so when Powerhouse U. plays Sister Mary's School of the Blind, that won't show up here, either. It's almost as if many of the big schools don't want to risk losing to a middle-tier out-of-conference opponent. Weird, right?

Home			Visitors			Home			Visitors
85	FIU	39	106	North Texas	30	90	FIU	34	104	North Texas	24
86	Idaho	38	101	Bowling Green	31	93	Idaho	34	108	Bowling Green	21
55	Kentucky	41	111	Western Kentucky	28	46	Kentucky	49	112	Western Kentucky	17
117	Memphis	23	32	Mississippi St.	37	111	Memphis	14	22	Mississippi St.	55
76	Syracuse	33	94	Wake Forest	27	64	Syracuse	28	65	Wake Forest	21
14	Wisconsin	48	107	UNLV	25	12	Wisconsin	55	103	UNLV	14
65	Baylor	26	1	TCU	39	56	Baylor	21	2	TCU	41

Key
Close game							Certain victory

The 2011-2012 Regression Based Analysis

I really want to beat Justin. Not just "sort of" beat Justin. I want to wipe that ACC smirk of his face and really give him the business.

The bad news is that RBA is up to 73.2% accuracy since 2000 while TFG is at 74.0%, implying that Justin gets approximately 5.3 games per year more than I do. However, I have been making significant strides on the difference between expected accuracy and actual accuracy. As of today, the difference between my predicted and actual performance is down to 0.2%, meaning that I miss 1.3 games per year more than I think I should. This manifests itself as an improvement in the confidence metric, implying that I may yet beat him in the TFD pick 'em pool.

The major update to RBA comes in the form of conference versus non-conference home field advantage. Teams that play each other every year are less phased by harsh environments, whereas teams that infrequently travel into opposing stadiums are more rattled. Based upon my data since 2000, home field advantage is worth approximately 1.9 PPH in conference games. In contrast, home field advantage is worth 3.6 PPH in non-conference games.

I experimented with a lot of different home field advantage metrics throughout the summer, including per-team advantage, linear regressions by strength, and linear regression by strength difference. These features generally caused drops by 1% accuracy or more. Justin suggests that attendance makes a difference, but I don't have a way to get these numbers into the algorithm.

One of the ideas that Justin and I have thrown around is changing predictors when we detect a lot of mispredictions. I took a shot at this by pruning history when encountering N consecutive mispredictions and had very poor results. In general, I don't tend to miss many consecutive picks. Furthermore, by time we detect the change (presumably due to injury, suspension, or whatever), the change has corrected itself, meaning that we miss even more games later.

In summary, there have been major experiments but only minor tweaks in the RBA algorithm during the summer of 2011. However, I'm relatively confident that RBA will keep it close during the 2nd Annual TFD College Football Pick 'Em.

Welcome to the 2011-2012 season

Welcome to the 2011-2012 college football season!

After a lengthy slumber the Tempo-Free Gridiron is back for the new year, and the theme of this year is "More Content." Our goal for this year is provide you with more interesting and more frequent updates to keep you coming back for more. In addition to a new look, we've got a slew of new regular features for our readers throughout the year. These include:

• Tuesday Trivia. Each Tuesday in September will explore a random trivia topic. We've done this before, but now we're making it official.
• Undefeated Countdown. We did this last year in a somewhat ad-hoc manner, but this year we're doing it every other Thursday starting in October. We'll examine the remaining undefeated teams, their possible road to a perfect season, and the main obstacles in their way.
• Conference Projections. Starting in October we'll have a weekly breakdown of the 12 conferences, spread out over three days. These breakdowns will include both the current standings and the projected final standings. The schedule will be:
• Tuesday: ACC, Big East, Conference USA, Independents
• Wednesday: Big Ten, Big XII, Mid-Atlantic, Mountain West
• Thursday: SEC, Pac-12, Sun Belt, WAC
• Games of the Week. Along with weekly predictions we'll focus on specific Saturday games that are interesting in some way or another. These may be the top-billed games on ESPN that week, or they may be a showdown of two middle-of-the-pack teams that pit an explosive offense against an impressive defense -- the Unstoppable Force/Immovable Object (UFIO) game -- or simply the game that's expected to turn into a shootout.

This is all on top of our weekly predictions, discussions, rankings, and complete bowl coverage that we've provided the previous years. Keep an eye on the blog or follow us on Twitter.

Revisiting Northwestern

Long-time readers may remember my claim that Northwestern was the luckiest team over the last decade. Well, now I get some validation from an independent source. The Iowa-centric blog Black Heart Gold Pants published an article today highlighting the luck of Big Ten teams since 2002. It's a great article, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. However, one particular quote stood out to me:

In every year included in this study, Northwestern had a positive overall pythagorean margin, and in all but one the LOLcats had a positive margin in conference play. Their gigantic lead in the chart above isn't due to one season; it's consistently winning a game to a game and a half more than expected. Northwestern's nine seasons are all within the top 30 overall (eight are within the top 20), and all but 2002's 1-7 Big Ten mark are within the top 22 in conference play. Once may be a random occurrence, and twice a coincidence, but if three is a trend, nine is gospel. Northwestern wins close games.

Clearly, Northwestern continues to exceed expectations, despite its academic pedigree and talent gap.