shakeitsugaree

The win against Oregon seemed to ‘right the ship,’ statistically speaking:

S&P+ ranks us 15 (+4), Sagarin 14 (+1). Both systems predict we will win both our remaining games; S&P projects we beat Colorado by 13 points and TDS by 15.

I became curious regarding the defense’s poor performances – were there any trends that would allow me to make…[Read more]

Yikes, that was … bad. But not too bad, as reflected in the advanced analytics.

Sagarin ranks us 15th, S&P+ 19th. We dropped 5 spots in Sagarin’s system, 7 in S&P+, despite having our absolute worst performance of the season.

The defense had a terrible day, turning in a performance in the 10th percentile. Looking at the game specific…[Read more]

NOTE – I am using Bill Connelly’s S&P system for this analysis. You can read up on S&P here

Has the offense improved under Troy Taylor? Eight games into year two may be too early to tell, but I took a look at a few S&P stats, just to see if there were any trends.

Sample size in football is an issue, especially with college football. There are a…[Read more]

Winning solves everything.

Sagarin has us at #10, S&P+ has us #12. Both systems favor us in the rest of our games.

Despite the love we’re getting in the rankings, the narrative is essentially unchanged. We’re a game up on everyone in the south in the loss column. If we lose one of our last three conference games, the only way another team pas…[Read more]

That win over Stanford really increased our value to the prognosticators. Here are the updated in conference win predictions:

Sagarin
Utah 7-2 Pac12 South Champ (tie breaker is head to head win over Colorado)
USC 6-3
Colorado 7-2

S&P+
Utah 6-3
USC 7-2 Pac12 South Champ
Colorado 6-3

This is much improved from last week’s predicted 5-4 finish by…[Read more]

Just a few moments that made the game extra awesome

Well … that loss was, uhm, not good.

Both Sagarin and S&P+ predict we go 5-4 in conference this year. The real bummer is that we are predicted to beat SC, but lose to Colorado.

S&P+ predicts the following finishes: USC 7-2 *south champion by head-to-head win over Colorado*, Colorado 7-2, Utah 5-4

Sagarin: USC 7-2 *south champion*, Colorado…[Read more]

Short version: S&P+ says we go 7-2 and win the south; Sagarin says we go 6-3 and SC finishes 7-2.

One thing I’ve been thinking about this week is how much I like Connelly’s S&P+ metric. There’s been a lot of talk on this site about whether statistics are meaningful or useful in any way. I would recommend reading this explanation of S&P+ (I’ve…[Read more]