This Guy Might Be On To Something . . .

On paper, this could be more important than the actual game itself

Like millions of Americans, every March my wife and I participate in some kind of NCAA baskteball pool. Whether it is based on school colors, team mascot, team name, or just sheer bias, my wife always has some kind of “irregular” method of picking the winning team. Strangely enough, she’s usually right.

This is a common phenomena witnessed by men all across the country. No matter how much research, stat crunching, or expertise you have in your sport, there is inevitably someone in your pool who made their picks based on “something shiny” and placed in the top three. Well, maybe that’s not so surprising after all . . .

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article tracking the winning percentages of teams based on their mascot. As it turns out, there are some interesting trends. According to the article, “Inanimate Objects” have the highest winning percentage of all the various mascot groups. Based on that, Ohio State Buckeyes fans should be cautiously optimistic in the Big Game against Michigan this year. Although OSU dropped one game already to a fellow inanimate object team, the Purdue Boilermakers (whose mascot is a train engine), things may not be as vulnerable for Sweatervest and crew as they might appear. First of all, this happened yesterday, and secondly, Ohio State has the mascot edge with their inanimate Buckeye mascot.

So, as you contemplate your bowl picks, your picks against the spread, your surprising upsets, and your bracket in March, make sure you know who is on your teams’ side-lines. Ignore the quarterback, the coach, or the injuries. Forget the assistants, the coordinators, or the donors. Take a good hard look at the mascot, and play the odds.

The Big Least?

On paper, the Big East looks pretty good this year

In college football today, it seems that at the beginning of the season, the national title game is reserved for USC and whichever team wins the SEC. Thankfully, some upstart PAC-10 team always manages to catch Pete & Co. napping, which opens the door for some other team to get in on the National Title action. However, winning the SEC in the minds of the pollsters seems to be a guaranteed ticket to the BCS title game. This really makes no sense when you consider the preponderance of Big Ten alumni who vote as coaches and who are present in the mainstream sports media. If anything, you’d think that they would be Big Ten apologists. Instead, it seems like every year the Big Ten is “down again” and the comings and goings of Big East teams are nearly irrelevant.





Perhaps this is because of the SEC making LOLhio State their whipping post two years in a row, while the poor record in the Bowl Season hasn’t helped the qualitative reputation of the Big Ten either. Perhaps this is also because every time a Big East team cracks the top two spot (e.g. South Florida and West Virginia), they, like Icarus, fail to sustain their flight to the sun. Whatever the reason for this anti-Big East and anti-Big Ten bias, it is not shared here at the Game on Paper.

Using this week’s TGOPoll, I took the average of the team ratings for each conference and found some surprising results. First of all, despite being another “down year” for the Big Ten, it is ranked 4th among the 11 BCS conferences — ahead of the PAC-10 and ACC mind you.

Even more interesting than the upward trend for the Big Ten is that pound for pound, the Big East appears to be the best conference in the country. With Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, South Florida, Rutgers, and West Virginia all ranked in the Top 15 of the TGOPoll, this ranking seems a little less surprising. Even the BCS has three Big East teams in its Top 25 (although with WVU’s loss to USF this week, that may not continue). What this means is that basically half of the conference is ranked among the Top 25 teams in the country. That’s 3/8 at worst, which by percentage is a pretty good showing.

Now, one of the “tricks of math” that might be occurring here is that the Big East is also the smallest of the “Big” conferences. The rest have between 10-12 teams whereas the Big East only has 8. So in a year where 3-5 teams are in the Top 25, the conference looks good, whereas the SEC might also have 3-5 teams in the Top 25, but not benefit quite as much given the overall size of the conference. So, as an experiment, I narrowed each conference down to its Top 8 teams to see if that made a difference in the ratings. What I discovered was that the Big East was still, pound for

On paper, a rising tide DOES float all ships

pound, the strongest conference on paper. Among the top four conferences, there was no movement in position. The SEC caught up quite a bit and the Big XII widened its position ahead of the Big Ten, but there were no changes in the rankings. The surprising shift was the I-A Independents and the MAC leap-frogging the ACC and the PAC-10.

So this leaves us wondering, why the love for USC and the SEC Champion? If the PAC-10 is the weakest of the “Big” conferences, and the SEC is not the best conference in the country, then why do those teams get such automatically preferential treatment from the other pollsters? They must know something I don’t, but when I play the game on paper, I see no reason to build in a conference bias of any sort.

Speaking of North Texas: The Best, Worst Game of the Week Is. . .

On paper, this might be a better match-up than WKU @ UNT

So this weekend on ESPN360.com you can watch the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers @ the University of Texas Mean Green.    According to Las Vegas, the score is expected to be 40 – 26.5.  This seems a bit ambitious considering this match-up features the #104 team v. #115 (there are 120 teams in FBS football, and five are tied at 115).  In a relative sense the score suggests nothing but razzle-dazzle in this game.  Based on what Las Vegas tells us, we should expect some big plays from the UNT offense.  However, statistically, that is not so.  Actually, when you look at the offenses of both teams, and you compare the offensive production v. the offensive efficiency of both teams, the edge goes to WKU.

Now, that being said, based on the chart above, it’s pretty clear that both teams have pretty lousy offenses.  Both have below average production and are below average on efficiency compared to the other 118 teams that make up the FBS.  In this case, it’s pretty hard to believe that UNT is going to hang 40 on anybody unless the defenses are pretty awful too.  Well, guess what.  The defensive units for both of these teams are also under-performers.

Yet again, we see that on average, UNT has the weaker of the two defenses.  If we look at the two teams statistically, then why would anyone favor UNT?  If you look at their schedule, their marquee match-up was against Alabama who beat them with a sack of doorknobs.  The score was 53-7.  They have only won one game so far this year, and it was against Ball State with a score of 20-10.  According to the TGOPoll, Ball state is tied with WKU for #115 in the country.  Based on the previous benchmark, 13.5 is pretty generous, and the 40 points required to get there is pretty steep.

Now, let’s look at WKU.  They were hired to be cannon fodder for both Tennessee and South Florida.  Against the vaunted USF defense, they hung 13 points.  When comparing common opponents between both schools (Louisiana-Lafayette, and Middle Tennessee State) WKU came out looking a little bit worse.  UNT was out-scored 75-55, whereas WKU was beaten 67-44.

We all know that the Transitive Property doesn’t apply to College Football (Just ask Michigan who came within 2 points of Iowa, only to get drubbed by like fifty-bajilllion points by Penn State, a team that Iowa beat by 10).  However, based on history and statistics, there is no reason to believe in the 40-point 13.5 margin butt-kicking that Las Vegas is expecting.  If you have ESPN360.com, and you are sadistic enough to want to watch this one, you’ll probably get some kind of sick pleasure out of this one.  But really, when you could be watching the Cocktail Party, would you boot up the old CPU and catch this slug-fest?

As for your hard-earned paycheck . . . Well, based on all of the stat crunching I have done this week, Big Red will be counting the Benjamins and lighting his Romeo y Julieta after this one.  On paper, the win could go to North Texas, but the cover should go to the Hilltoppers.

The “S” Words

On paper, it looks like this guy has a better pick-up line than "Let's Ball."

Given that I am a good, God-fearing man who enjoys sports and a beer now and again, I often find myself in a bar at some point during the week. My friends have pointed out that just about every time we go to the bar, I have some weird magnetism that causes divorced, drunk, angry old men to gravitate to me to talk sports.  This is particularly weird because I am a dude. Most of the time its utter jibberish. One time, this one dude repeatedly told me about his days at Ball State where he “had a shirt that said ‘Let’s Ball’ — and the girls knew what it meant, heh heh.” Another time, one of these dudes asked if I was actually old enough to remember when Hayden Fry coached at Iowa (he retired a year before I went there). But most of the time these conversations revolve around some long-forgotten great play that their favorite local team pulled off on a Tuesday night in 1968. I’m polite about it, but it is rather distracting.

However, there was one time where I was truly impressed by the random drunk dude that decided we were friends. His question was this:

“OK, if you like college sports, name all the FBS football teams whose mascot does not end in the letter ‘S.’”

What he was referring to is teams like the Ohio State Buckeyes have a team mascot (Buckeyes) that is written as a plural. Unknown to this guy, this is one of my favorite sports questions to pull on people at tailgate. If you enjoy being a know-it-all sports fan, or if you need to shut-up the arrogant jack-ass four tables over who has complained about the ref on every play, feel free to challenge him with that one.

If you haven’t already solved the question yourself, the answer is as follows:

The University of Illinois Fighting Illini
The University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish
The United States Naval Acadamey Midshipmen
Syracuse University Orange (formerly Orangemen, but they still count)
Stanford University Cardinal
The University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane
The Tulane University Green Wave
The University of Alabama Crimson Tide
Marshall University Thundering Herd
The University of Nevada Wolfpack
North Carolina State University Wolfpack

. . . and the one that stumps everybody no matter how hard they try:

The University of North Texas Mean Green

College Football: University of Cincinnati Ranked #1 in First-Ever “TGOP Poll”

Ever since the BCS opened the door to letting the Division I-A (I hate the FBS/FCS terminology) National Title be decided on paper, nerds everywhere have been trying to come up with their own, “better” computer ranking system. There are some good ones out there (I’ll highlight them over the next few weeks), and some not so good ones out there, but until the teams decide it for themselves, anyone’s opinion is just as legit as anyone else’s on who deserves to play for all the marbles. So as long as the national title isn’t decided on the field, and is decided on paper, TGOP will be crunching numbers and polling along with Harris, AP, the coaches, and the rest of them.

So here it is, “The Game on Paper” has released it’s first-ever College Football Poll. Shockingly, the University of Cincinnati is ranked at the top of the heap. Congratulations to the Bearcats who have not gotten much love this season. Perhaps its because they have the stigma of playing in “The Big LEast,” or maybe the AP and coaches are too brand name-focused to recognize talent (hell, even the BCS computers are picking the somewhat off-brand IOWA as #1, c’mon people). Anyhow, cheers to Brian Kelly and crew for debuting at #1. And for those of you who are wondering, no, this isn’t a fix. My wife is a die-hard Xavier fan, and I am a graduate of Iowa, so there is no way I would cook this one for Cincinnati. Credit where credit is due — congratulations Bearcats.

Some notable WTF’s in the rankings include Central Michigan in the Top 5, Penn State ranked ahead of Iowa (who won 21-10 in this year’s meeting), and the team that nobody loved (Temple) cracking the Top 25.

The team ranking system (and we rank all teams from 1-120) relies on four key measures: TGOP calculated Strength of Schedule (SOS), Dominance Index (DI), Wins/Loss Record, and VATI (Versus Average Team Index) which is another unique measure calculated by the TGOP model. Last year, I piloted this ranking system for fun, and correctly projected 22 of the “actual” Top 25 teams prior to going into the Bowl Season. Florida was picked as the National Champion by the model. At least that played out on the field.

Lastly, for those of you who care about “Others receiving votes,” the rest of the top 35 are rounded out with: Northern Illinois, Ohio State, LSU, California, Utah, Missouri, Wisconsin, BYU, Clemson, and Tulsa. Yes, Tulsa.

We’ll see you next week for our next installment of “TGOP Poll.”

The Game on Paper Knows the Score

On paper, you can score .25

A few years back, in an inspired moment of selfishness and attempted parenting, Homer Simpson introduced his daughter, Lisa, to the exciting world of sports gambling. Homer’s reasoning for why he gambled was that it put the “icing on the cake” and made the games more fun to watch. Homer may be an American icon for stupidity and poor parenting, but in this case, boy was he right. Whether you are doing pick ‘em games online, betting among friends, or gambling Grandma’s farm at Vegas, adding the line and the spread to a game makes it more fun to watch.

For example, last year, I remember watching the Arkansas v. Florida game, as time was winding down, I found myself celebrating like an idiot after Florida turned what was meant to be a short yardage, drive extending run into something like a 30-yard gainer to beat the spread. The year before, I was praying Navy v. Notre Dame would go into double over time to force the winning team to win by 8 and therefore cover the 7.5 spread.

Everyone has their own system for making bets and picks. For some people its gut, others experience, and others still, which team has the cuter mascot. For me personally, looking at the spread in isolation doesn’t really tell me anything. Let’s take for example the marquee match-up this week: Texas @ Oklahoma State where Texas is favored by 8.5. By itself, 8.5 is kind of a weird number isn’t it. What is that? A touchdown, a 2-pt conversion, and missed extra-point by OSU? Three field-goals? A touchdown, PAT, and field-goal? Depending on how you interpret that 8.5 you could get to a bunch of different places.

Thankfully, Las Vegas gives us some insights into their infinite sports wisdom by also providing us with the over/under line for the week as well. In the case of Texas @ Oklahoma State, the over/under line is currently 52. A common mistake people make is just taking the over/under line and dividing it in half, and adding the 8.5 to it. This is wrong.

If we took 52 and divided it in half, we would have 26 and 26. If we add the 8.5 to one side, we have a score of 34.5 to 26. The problem is that 26+26+8.5 =60.5. In that case, we are giving Texas a lot more credit than Vegas is.

To do this right, you take the over/under line and divide it in half like we did before. So right now, the score is 26 to 26. We then take the spread and divide IT in half as well so we get 4.25 and 4.25. We then ADD 4.25 to Texas because they are favored, and we SUBTRACT 4.25 from Oklahoma State since they are expected to lose. The result, then, is that Las Vegas believes the score of the Texas @ Oklahoma State game is 30.25 Texas, 21.75 Oklahoma State.

So now we have to ask ourselves two questions:

1. Do I think Texas can hang more than 30 on Oklahoma State?
2. Do I think Oklahoma State will put up less than 22 on Texas?

At least now we have a score to react to. Does 30-22 sound compelling? If so, Cowboy up. If you believe in Colt McCoy (a man whose very name screams “Texas”) and you fear the Texas defense, then “Hook ‘em Horns.”

For those of us who like to go the extra mile, you can go to http://www.cfbstats.com and check to see whether this makes sense based on the average PPG both teams put up. If you are like me, will find yourself Saturday morning with a pick sheet in one hand and a beer in the other at tailgate, at least you have something better to react to than just a number in isolation.

Welcome to “The Game on Paper”

One time, one of my Canadian friends told me, “Americans live to work.  We Canadians work to live.”  Never having been to Canada, I’ll have to take her word for it on what life up North is like, but I totally understand what she means about us Americans.  Yet, although we Americans are a hard-working and industrious sort when it comes to our jobs, there are some magic words that can totally derail the productivity of any American worker.  Whether you are a Chicago Teamster, a New York Stock Broker,  or a Lawyer  in Texas, the words “Did you see the game last night?” basically give anyone in America license to stop what they are doing and talk sports for at least ten minutes.

Now, this conversation almost always evolves the same way.  Initially, the parties involved  rehash the last game for a few minutes.  Maybe there were some highlights — a nice catch, a last second takedown, a good hit in the open field, a winning shot — whatever they were, they consume the bulk of the conversation for a little while.  But, as the conversation goes on (and it inevitably goes on) the merits of last night’s game fade into speculation about what comes next.  It may be the next game, the next series, the next season, or next year, but no matter what, the talk of the past always somehow leads to talk of the future.  And it is in this future speculation that we often hear the words, “On paper, we should be . . . ” and that is when the conversation really gets fun.

It is for that very reason that I have created thegameonpaper.com.  As an historian by training, a Market Researcher by trade, and a sports nut by accident, I have found over the years that I have some weird hobbies.  At the top of the heap is my love of crunching past sports data in new and unique ways that give me the edge in office pools, water cooler conversations, and at awkward parties.  The goal of this site is to bring those insights out in the open for discussion,  fact-checking, entertainment, and of course total ridicule.  So whether you are an avid fan, a data junkie, an on again/off again sports gambling addict, or a heckler, welcome to “The Game on Paper.”  Let’s play ball.