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"Strength of Schedule/Strength of Record" data over the last few college football seasons

Posted on 11/30/21 at 7:31 pm
Posted by TackySweater
Member since Dec 2020
11751 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 7:31 pm
This is kinda long at the beginning because I wanted to explain what some of this stuff means because it's still a bit confusing to me. But the data is at the bottom if you just want to look at that.

I decided to dig into the numbers and see what they actually say. This is all coming from ESPN, so make of that what you may. I wasn't sure where else to grab this data from, so I started here.

There's some terminology here that is still somewhat confusing and hard to nail down exactly what it means even after I dove into it.

Strength of Record TLDR: how strong is your record based on your schedule? Reflects chance that an average Top 25 team would have team's record or better, given the schedule.
A 5-0 Buffalo team is not going to have the same SOR as a 5-0 Kentucky team, for example. Strength of record is the probability that an average top-25 team could achieve a team's record given the particular schedule that team has faced. A higher Strength of Record indicates a more impressive accomplishment – it means that the team’s W-L record was more difficult to achieve.

Strength of Record captures a team’s “quality wins” and “bad losses” from an opponent-strength perspective, but it’s not concerned with the team’s point margin or other ways of measuring dominance or luck, just whether it's a win or a loss.

Game Control TLDR: style points, if you struggle during games, your GC isn't as great
Play by play data for every game is used to determine a team’s chances of winning on every play based on score, time remaining, and other game situations. This can calculate each team’s average in-game win probability to measure how it went about winning, not just the W/L.

Each team’s average in-game win probability gets translated to Game Control based on how hard it would be for a top team to achieve it, given the schedule. How well a team controlled games from start to finish, accounting for the difficulty of the games it has played to date.

Strength of Schedule just factors in opponents winning percentages with some other weighted criteria based on opponents' opponents (I think).

Anyway, I may be off in my understanding of some of this. And again, this is all ESPN's methodology. But either way, if all teams are getting judged by the same criteria, I think we can learn at least something from the numbers. I enjoyed digging into it and putting it together.

There was no way I was going to try to type this straight out without being able to format it here, so I'm using a picture and hoping this comes through fine.

Posted by St8lyOaks
Member since Dec 2015
267 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 7:36 pm to
Posted by Flashback
reading the chicken bones
Member since Apr 2008
8303 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 7:42 pm to
Good find!
Posted by KingBeingking
Member since Jul 2014
2388 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 7:46 pm to
Consistent results
Posted by TackySweater
Member since Dec 2020
11751 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 8:58 pm to
From some. Maybe not from others.
Posted by Rossberg02
Member since Jun 2016
2591 posts
Posted on 11/30/21 at 9:04 pm to
If these inbred mouth breathers aren’t happy with Kelly, no amount of logic will convince them.

Amnesia will kick in around week 5 and reality will set in when the other coaches are mediocre next year.
Posted by TackySweater
Member since Dec 2020
11751 posts
Posted on 12/1/21 at 10:42 am to
quote:

If these inbred mouth breathers aren’t happy with Kelly, no amount of logic will convince them.


Just some data to look at. Wasn’t necessarily looking at him alone.
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