M-Borg vs. THE Flavortown U Thread, Orig. by Buckeye Paul, absconded w/by talent.

[iam416]

Your drunker than usual this AM. I'll be well-pleased if Ohio State's offense is really effective tonight. I expect that it will be a slog. I'll be thoroughly irate if nFw's offense is effective tonight. I expect OSU to really make it tough sledding for them.

But, hey, you give Fitzgerald a bye week to prepare and then have to go to the Snakepit for a Friday night game -- this one walks, talks and acts like the death trap game.

[AlabamAlum]

[iam416]

Ohio State has probably outrecruited nFw a little, but nFw has FITZGERALD!!!! So, yeah. This one is going to be a war. I mean, they went into Madison and played Wisconsin pretty much dead even.

[froot loops]

Normally Fitzgerald's team start off slow and by the end of the year they are OK. Not this year.

[AlabamAlum]

Dead even? Wisconsin still won by 2 scores. And it was only that close because NW scored two garbage time TDs after the Badgers went into run-the-clock-out Saban mode.

The Wildcats are horrible. Besides the Wiscy game...

*Lost by 10 to a bad Stanford team.
*Lost by 21 to a mediocre MSU team.
*Lost to a really bad Nebraska team.
*Their ONE win was against a shitty 2-4 UNLV team by 16 (it was 16-14 at the half)

This is a bad team. A really bad team. That's why the line is where it is.

[froot loops]

They do have the great new practice facility at Northwestern, so you will probably hear about that a few times during the broadcast.

[iam416]

Dead even? Wisconsin still won by 2 scores. And it was only that close because NW scored two garbage time TDs after the Badgers went into run-the-clock-out Saban mode.

Wisconsin only scored 10 offensive points. It was only two scores because Fitzgerald went for 2 at 24-9 and failed and went for two again at 24-15 and failed. They then got the ball back with plenty of time to score what could have been a tying TD but for the 2-pt advanced stats gambit. I also think Wisconsin's offensive TD came on its first or second drive. They were well and truly stymied for the bulk of the game.

[iam416]

This is a bad team. A really bad team. That's why the line is where it is.

They're a really bad offensive team. Really bad. Defensively, they're pretty good. The total is 50. The line is 27/28. That's pretty much a 38-10-ish prediction. The 10 is pretty spot on. The 38, I think, is optimistic.

[AlabamAlum]

[iam416]

They're top 10 in both FEI and SP+ for defense.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Fancy Stats? really? Stop you're hand wringing. The Wildcats are no better a team than that other team in Illinois if even that. What's good about Illinois is spoiled by their defense and what's good about Northwestern is spoiled by their offense.

It's going to look like one of those entertaining Friday night HS games featuring one team with a QB that dominates the gave v. a horribly over-matched team trying to figure out how to get first downs.

[AlabamAlum]

Talent,

-I have issues with the FEI (and always have). I do not think Clemson is the best defense in the nation and they have Bama top 10. But if we're gonna go with FEI, don't just look at defense, look at the overall picture and NW is not in that top 50. They have Louisville, Miss State, Ole Miss, Wyoming, Western Kentucky, and a ton of other shitballs ranked higher than NW overall.

-They're not in the top 60 overall on SP+ (a system I do not like either, despite Connelly having the Bukeyes ranked #1). He doesn't have Clemson as his best defense, he has Oregon. Meh. Just give me the raw stats and I can come to my own conclusion. That conclusion is that NW is a shitball and the Buckeyes win easily.

[Jeff Buchanan]

AA, serious question:why don't you "like" FEI and S&P+? I think fancy stats in general have their limitations in college ball because, well, college ball. They might have stronger predictive capacity for the NFL and I think if I looked around I could find some articles that say that, but still .......

I think they are a lot more useful in comparing teams than looking at "raw stats." The one thing I give credence to in FEI is the Opponent Adjusted Efficiencies (OFEI and DFEI). If you look at Alabama, osu and Clemson, for example, the rankings look pretty good in those categories.

. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fei/2019

A year or so ago, before Bill Connely's S&P+ became owned by ESPN and you could access them, I paid attention to efficiency and explosiveness. At some point somebody wrote that explosive plays had the biggest correlation to wins than any other analytic factor.

To me, fancy stats are available and their limitations in the college game notwithstanding, they serve a useful purpose when comparing teams. JMO and YMMV.

[AlabamAlum]

Jeff,

They are okay and as part of a meta-analysis, they can be useful. But they all just massage the basic stats in slightly different ways, perhaps with the odd variable, and come up with a ranking.

Take FEI for example, Fremeau basically looks at a team and rates them on the percentage of drives that they score. On average, 25% of drives are TDs and 12% are FGs. Score more than that and you have a good offense and if you hold a team to less than that you have a good defense. That's too simplified, but it's the gist. It's okay. If Alabama scores a TD 41.2% of the time our FEI goes up, but so does our Scoring Offense, etc, etc.

For example: Look at the OFEI top 10. Now look at basic Scoring Offense top 10: Eight of the Top Ten teams are on both lists. OFEI doesn't like Penn State and App State. In place of those guys, they have Texas and Iowa State. Meh.

Football analysis can never be truly scientific because events aren't reproducible. It's much more like psychology than physics, in other words. If I heat pure water to 212F at sea level I get steam. It's predictable. Psychology isn't. Football isn't. But, like I said at the beginning, it's fine as part of a meta-analysis. I am just not sure it's that needed, and certainly not as a stand-alone.

[iam416]

AA:

I don't think nFw is a good team. Their FEI and SP+ spots are definitely in the ballpark. I think wrt Bama the stats pick up on garbage time scores vs real-time scores. Whether that's a valid think to pick up is up for debate, to be sure. But Alabama's defense has been weakest at the end of games. That is consistent with a team depleted by injuries -- the depth isn't there to either (a) play at a high level for 4 full quarters or (b) play competent 2nd team defense (or maybe both).

I do think nFw has a pretty good defense. I think their offense is probably as bad as any P5 school except Rutgers.