The mixture of emotions surrounding the Virginia football program is enough to turn the most even-keeled fan into a mess of optimism and despondence. On one hand, current savior of the offense Phillip Sims will start his first game this weekend in place of previous savior of the offense Mike Rocco.[1] On the depressing side of things, the 2-3 Hoos are traveling to North Carolina to face a 4-1 Duke team[2] in a game they probably need to win to have a hope of becoming bowl eligible.[3] I’m already holding my breath.
The less informed of us might laugh and arrogantly wave our hands in our patterned orange pants and v-sabre bowties[4] and say “Duke has long been the laughingstock of ACC football, it’s the perfect opportunity for the Hoos to right the ship down in Durham.”[5] A sobering look at recent seasons reveals that the Hoos have lost three of their last four games against the Blue Devils. [6] I’m now holding my breath even more.
This post will attempt to predict the outcome of Saturday’s game.[7] As per usual, I’m going to slightly alter the method this week. I used two separate methods in predicting the TCU game, but was shortsighted enough to apply my own discussion of intangibles to the resulting range of possible scores; simply averaging the two scores would have predicted an almost exactly correct final margin. So that’s what I’ll do this time. The final prediction follows the descriptions[8] and individual predictions[9] for each of the two methods.
{Prediction Method 1: Overall Rank Difference vs. Point Difference and Points Scored}
The first method calculates the overall rank difference, in Sagarin rankings, for the two teams involved in the game and plots this value against the final point margin and points scored. The idea is that any rank difference between two teams can then suggest a final score difference and a point total from the perspective of one team. In this iteration, I limited the games creating this plot to Hoos and Duke games this season.
The above games created the below plot:
The Sagarin rankings have Duke ranked at 86 and the Hoos at 85, thus predicting the Hoos will score 28 points[10] and win by 1.[11] Method 1 predicts: Hoos 28 – 27 Duke. As mentioned above, I wanted to verify this score by comparing it to a completely separate final prediction …
{Prediction Method 2: Offensive and Defensive Rank Differences vs. Points Scored}
Football Outsiders separately ranks both offenses and defenses in the FBS. For this method, I plotted the rank difference between Team A’s offense and Team B’s defense versus the number of points that Team A scored in the game. This also works in reverse to create a whole separate set of data points; the difference between Team B’s offense and Team A’s defense and the points scored by Team B.[12] The following chart shows this data for the same set of games:
This method gives a graph and equation of:
The Duke offense is ranked 72nd, while the Hoos defense is ranked 46th.[13] Based on these rankings, the above equation predicts 24 points for Duke. On the other side of the ball, the Hoos offense is ranked 78th, while the Duke defense is ranked 105th;[14] predicting that the Hoos will score 43 points[15] against Duke. Method 2 gives Hoos 43 – 24 Duke.
{Conclusion}
The Vegas line currently has the Blue Devils winning by 1.5. My two methods produced drastically different results, but at least both picked the “under” on the final score margin. I’ll stick with my averaging method despite the large variation and hope that the errors in these two methods perfectly offset each other.
Final Prediction: Hoos 35 – 26 Duke[16]
- [1] the title might be a bit of a stretch for Rocco, but he was at least considered good … for a while ↩
- [2] mandatory note that Duke has largely played really terrible teams to amass this impressive record ↩
- [3] although the rest of the ACC isn’t that great either, so who knows. Also, “any given Saturday” etc. etc. ↩
- [4] as you can see, I’ll be commenting on the sports knowledge of a terrible UVA caricature advanced by other members of the ACC. A person who is undoubtedly not you. ↩
- [5] since this caricature would also use nautical metaphors. ↩
- [6] Sad. So very sad. ↩
- [7] My success in predicting previous games can be found here. ↩
- [8] which are worth skipping if you’ve read the descriptions before ↩
- [9] probably shouldn’t skip these ↩
- [10] per the orange line ↩
- [11] the blue line. ↩
- [12] so even though the third column says “D rank difference,” it’s still from the perspective of the opposing team’s offense. ↩
- [13] interestingly, it’s gone up since the TCU game ↩
- [14] yikes. Hopefully a field day for Sims “the savior of the offense” ™ ↩
- [15] oh snap! ↩
- [16] note that any discrepancies from averaging are due to fractions of points that are calculated but not shown in this post ↩
