re: Week 12 CFB Bet Thread

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Hey guys, I have a question that I think you guys might be helpful with.

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The stats you are going to find on cfbstats will not be predicative enough to come up with a good predicative model. They are very basic level stats and in football you need more context, i.e. what yard line the drive started on, how much time is on the clock, whether or not the drive is a "junk" drive.

At minimum you will need drive level data. Every single drive, offense and defense, every FBS vs. FBS game, for all 128 FBS teams. It's hard to come by for free. Ideally, you would also have play-by-play data for all teams, but that is near impossible to come by without shelling out major $$$. I had someone supply me with drive data, but every now and then a game would be missing and I would have to manually enter in the drive data myself, which took about 45 minutes a game. So if 2-3 games were missing I'd have to spend 2 hours doing the tedius task of entering in drive data. Yuck.

I ran a model this season up until the past two weeks(just don't have the time to update it and my stat supplier was becoming shaky as I mentioned in the above paragrah) and was hitting about 52.9%. Barely enough to be profitable.

I am a professional statistician(its what I do for a living) and this model I have used hit 52.9% this year and 53.2% last year. Modeling football is probably a fool's errand and this is probably my last year to do it. I have more success in basketball(College and WNBA).

60%-70% is impossible for football even if you had the best predicative model in the world. Too much variance and situational noise to make any football model that hits above 55% in the long run.

If you are going to model do basketball. All you need is a general box score to create a good system.

Sounds like he's only trying to predict the winner, not the winner ATS. And if its just for a class, it doesn't need to be near as complex or complete as yours, ACC. BTW, thanks for the work you put in during the season. Several of us were using your model, as you already know.

Heavy: Virginia Tech +6, Ohio State -13, Baylor pk
Light: Iowa State +6, Georgia Southern +14

Any action tonight?

Updated Week 12 Card ~

Ole Miss -4
Ohio State -13
Utah -2
Ok State PK

Noticed Ole Miss and Ok State are moving my way...

Surprised Utah hasn't moved with Booker out.

Anyone like air force and the points?

Yeah I'm about to throw down on AF (half unit lol)

ACC anything you like in cincy game tonight

Oklahoma line finally posted... opened at -10, now at -11.

I planned on playing TCU but I think that line is actually favorable to Oklahoma. Will wait to see how it moves. Would love to grab TCU at +14.