A Meaningless Comparison – MAC Championship Edition
Posted: December 5th, 2008 | Filed under: Last Decade | No Comments »
I got the idea for this from here. The chart below shows how Ball St and Buffalo performed against the 5 opponents they shared. 5 games played at different times of the year in random locations with varying personnel and field conditions. I think I may have just re-defined the term meaningless comparison.
The first thing the chart suggests is that Ball St is probably better than Buffalo. Stop the presses.
The second thing I learned is that Miami (Ohio) fucking sucks. What an eye opener.
What I found interesting is that Ball St outscored these 5 opponents by an average of 16.6 points despite “only” out-gaining them by about 70 yards per game. This made me curious enough to go back and look at how they did against the rest of their opposition:
That is a little bit better in so much as they at least exhibited signs of the dominance you would expect from a 12-0 squad. On the year they have outscored opponents by 21 PPG while out-gaining them by 103.92 YPG.
You would think that margin of victory clip would be unsustainable without an increase in yardage differential, but to date Ball St is the least penalized team in the country and they have also done a fantastic job of protecting the ball, so I just really don’t know. Yardage is the most predictive of the 3 stats but completely discounting the other two would be dishonest.
At any rate, if you are laying the 3 scores worth of chalk with Ball St then you better hope that they continue to play smart and/or that Buffalo does a lot of stupid shit* because the Cardinal probably won’t able to peck the Bulls off the field tonight.
If your opinion of Ball St is based on their record, avg margin of victory, ranking, and # of weekday appearances on ESPN then you are probably overvaluing them**. I certainly didn’t need 2 charts and 8 paragraphs to tell me that Ball St is overrated.
* – A given
** – Who on Earth would do this?
How did you do the net yardage? I did the same thing for this game, and I’m trying to figure out if I can’t add or the box scores I used were wrong.
The mistake could have been made on my end. I threw this together while at work.
Just as a heads up, SMQ did a great analysis last year showing penalty yardage had no correlation to winning. I’m at work, so I can’t find the link, but if you google something like “SMQ penalties” you should find it in the first couple of hits.
“MQ did a great analysis last year showing penalty yardage had no correlation to winning.”
Yea, I wasn’t sure about that.
Turnover margin obviously has a huge correlation with winning (and MOV), but it is also not totally a byproduct skill either.
you still putting a post on your hilton selections
Didn’t put anytime into them this week. Straight guesses:
Seattle
Detroit
Buffalo
Jacksonville
San Fran
I will try to get back on track next week.
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Was I close with my Sat plays
Zona State
USC/UCLA Under
Hawaii
South Florida
USC
Florida
I played 3 of those.