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 linked to this before) before you decide to disregard statistics. You can find the S&P+ rankings here. Connelly claims that S&P+ tends to hit between 51 and 54 percent against the Vegas spread. Not bad. BTW, S&P+ says we win this Saturday; this is the difference in whether we take the south, because SC is also predicted to finish 7-2, but we would hold the head to head tiebreaker.
For a brief version of the long explanation, S&P+ evaluates a team’s performance in what Connelly defines as the Five Factors of winning: efficiency, explosiveness, field position, finishing drives, and turnovers. These factors are weighted to reflect their relative importance in predicting wins; Connelly states in his explanation that efficiency is the single most important stat in creating wins. What is efficiency? It is based on ‘success rate’ which Connelly defines thusly:
First downs: gaining at least 50 percent of necessary yardage (usually 5 yards) is successful.
Second downs: gaining at least 70 percent of necessary yardage is successful.
Third or fourth downs: gaining at least 100 percent of necessary yardage is successful.
There’s more to S&P+, but in looking at the breakdown in how each team is ranked, this system makes intuitive sense. For example, Utah as the #1 defense as determined by S&P+; Alabama has the #1 offense.
What do you guys think? Are there better analytics out there that anyone knows about?
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