The Big Twelve...Ten?...XII? Preview

There’s a bit of an identity crisis for the Big XII (minus II) as they have only ten teams and no more conference championship game, which to some critics was the reason why TCU was wrongfully left out of the playoffs last year. Merely because they blew a lead in a shootout with Baylor and ended up as co-champions, despite having one of the more flawless executions during games in the nation. Oh well. That’s just my take on that, I’ll get off my “TCU got screwed” soap box and get back to the matters at hand, and that’s cracking down the Big X this year. Some ADs want to see the return of twelve teams so they can have said championship game so they can have said winner be relevant in the national picutre. My response to that is maybe you should have more relevant teams? The problem with the Big XII-2 is that there is a hierarchy (as I’ll explain below) but any disruption of the hierarchy (*cough upsets cough*) would spoil any long-lasting post season play for the teams at the top. And in a conference like this where defense doesn’t really exist outside of TCU, it can, and will, happen. So let’s get to it:

Blog Notes!

Hey all. Thanks for all of the support I've gotten since the launch of this blog!

Just wanted to let you know a couple things:

1) The Twitter is now live! Follow @TheNumberGames for live reactions and updates on smaller posts because I'm going to try and not spam on Facebook!

2) This week's goal (other than working on the next preview) is to make this look pretty, so be on the look out for that!

Thank you again to everyone! I'm really looking forward to the progress of this!

All-Star Break Historical Spreads

These were the historical spreads I was referring to in making those MLB projections. See where your favorite team stacks up this past decade!

College Football Preview: The ACC

I cannot wait until Labor Day weekend. No, I'm not breaking out my awesome grilling techniques that I totally told myself I'd work on this summer (spoiler alert: I haven't been doing that).

College football returns on that weekend! More specifically on that Thursday with a couple interesting match-ups (I see you North Carolina v South Carolina, Harbaugh's debut with Michigan traveling against a chippy Utah squad, and TCU at Minnesota). So I figured it's time to break out some pre-season projections which I have quickly figured out is a lot harder to do as a college student with a part-time job doing this as a hobby than the people that do this for a living can. The reason why I say that is as I was doing my diggings for the ACC this week, I found out that there is some fairly limited projections on the defensive side of the ball than the offensive, so it's fairly hard to project something you're unfamiliar with (such as me with the ACC). I'm much more confident in my abilities to tell when a team is overrated or underrated AS THE SEASON PROGRESSES, than to tell how a team will perform if data for half of the team is fuzzy. But we're going to give this one hell of a shot, that's for sure:

MLB All-Star Break Projections

Ah the All-Star Break. Highlighted by the Home Run Derby and the Celebrity Softball game. Oh, and it’s also the time where the best players from each league duke it out to see which division will win home field advantage for the World Series. It makes me wonder though if there are any players from really bad teams that know they won’t be anywhere close to making the playoffs that will try their best to throw the game just to mess with any teams in their division that do have a shot at making it that far. Would that be bad sportsmanship? Probably. But sounds like something I would do. The AL holds the rights to host Game 7 as they beat the NL 6-3, but we need to now ask, what AL team would truly benefit from this? Aka, who will be playing in the World Series?

The other cool thing I like about the All-Star Break is that sometimes the team who is leading at the break, won’t when it matters at the end of the season. So that’s what I decided to look at to answer the question above. I took the last decade’s worth of data and took their splits from the All-Star Break to the end of the season (Took how many games they were over .500 and compared). The usual trend is that if a team is doing good at the break, they’ll likely be holding a similar record at the end of the season, if not taking their record to extreme heights (I.e, the Yankees, who have been dominant in the decade, average a +14 game split, going as high as +30. The amazing thing with the Yankees too is that even when they have been struggling as of late, their lowest split was +1. Plus freaking one. They didn’t make the playoffs that year but that’s still phenomenal given the other numbers in this set that I may post later) But of course it could work the other way too. Two numbers that stuck out were a -5 by the 2005 Padres and a -4 by the 2006 St. Louis team that shall never be named, both teams won the division with a negative split. Now yes I see having a split of -5 to +5 is actually average, but compared to the rest of the division winners, and even some of the runner-up teams, a split like that usually won’t get you anywhere.

Welcome to The Number Games!

Greetings everyone! Welcome to my blog, The Number Games, where the odds are always in your favor! (Can I say that? Totally saying that.) This blog will, for the most part, be a method of making my own predictions in the sports world, based off of numerical data that is out there (I’ll do a couple other random things I’m sure as different seasons come and go. And I may rant…a lot…about other random things…see below). People don’t know how much numbers can really tell the tale, so I’m hoping, being the number nerd that I am, I can create more exposure to this phenomena.

The Beginnings:

This whole idea has its grass roots in a cold, possibly haunted, dorm room in December 2013, my freshman year of college. Now December for college students usually mean finals. Well, I somehow lucked out and only had just two tests on the very last week and one massive project due at the second to last week. So naturally, as any college student would, I decided to do something else in those three and a half weeks! Ok, so that’s not exactly how it went down…I was unable to do my project with my roommate around because it involved watching a movie over and over again, and I wanted to be a good roommate and not annoy him with that, so I just did it when he was in class most of the afternoon (This sentence makes it sound like I never went to class, but don’t worry I did. They were mostly in the mornings that semester, which pro-tip to any high schoolers reading this; avoid morning classes at all costs, they stink. Like anything before 9:30, just don’t if you can, you’ll thank me later. See this blog can totally be about things other than sports!).

But this left my nights fairly open, like more open than what they normally were (my friends/floor-mates know what I’m talking about when I say that). So I needed to do something with my time to prevent going insane because I hate studying for tests more than a week in advance, let alone three weeks. So that’s when sports comes in and saves the day! That year in the college football world was the last year that the BCS would be used to determine who played in the national championship game. Everyone seemed to hate the BCS and the computers behind it, but I wanted to know why they’re getting rid of it in favor of a committee, because no matter what, whoever the “next team out” is, will be really, really pissed (See TCU last season, who ended up reaming a very good Ole Miss team in their bowl game, 42-3). So I decided to make my own system taking certain bits of data from every (yes, every) single game played from all (yes, again, all) 120 some teams to see if I can replicate and/or see what the numbers can really say, which made for a very effective use of my three weeks in between doing school work and other “college” things (In last season’s model TCU was #1 and should’ve bumped out Alabama, who actually rightfully lost to Ohio State in the “semi-final” but whatever). From this information I came up with a couple assumptions, some were right, but some still needed work, so I revamped my formulas for this past season and got some semi-better results (and actually did it in line with the season so I didn’t have to do 500 some games at one time), but by no means am I perfect.

Where We Are Today:

I got to thinking though, why should I just stick to college football? (Spoiler alert: The meat of this blog will be about college football…featuring the NFL!) Summer of 2014 was the FIFA World Cup so I decided to take a stab at the other football. Now there wasn’t too much data that could be manipulated with soccer, so some broad assumptions were made but we ended up with this:

https://twitter.com/rahmeenbzad/status/479083759157788674

Whoa. Happy coincidence? Yeah I thought so too. I wanted to launch this blog earlier in the summer but decided I should wait to see if I actually have something here as June seemed to be a very busy month in the sports world, instead of me just blowing smoke:

 https://twitter.com/rahmeenbzad/status/606195213019791360

(Yes, the Warriors needed 6 and Barcelona didn’t need extra time to handle Juventus, but I’ll chalk it up as wins anyway. BUT, if you’re going to sit here and tell me that with all of the bracket possibilities in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, that I got lucky with calling the fact that USA and Japan will be positioned exactly so they will only meet in the finals, and actually win their games to MEET in the finals, then you can stop reading. Actually don’t stop reading, I need all the attention I can get please. Alas no, I did not think that final would be that one-sided, then again no one really expected it either)

Well, that’s enough evidence for me, and this line will never be more relevant in life

 So please, join me as I make a fool/genius out of myself by ranting about a bunch of sports! It'll be slow as I'm just starting this up and need to get used to everything this has to offer and all the details, so this blog will also look very ugly for a while. But have no fear, I intend on making weekly posts (for now, we'll see how my mood is when college comes back around). ALSO there will be an accompanying Twitter account coming soon!

Expect the weeks leading up to the college football season to be about...you guessed it, college football previews.

Authors Note: I can't get the Twitter posts to physically show so you'll have to settle for the links. If someone knows how to do that, that would be appreciated!