Football

It was just time to get down to it. I had been delaying the inevitable, running 100,000 simulations of each and every private school six-man state bracket. For details on how I did this, please read the earlier posts I have written about the public school brackets and other Monte Carlo simulations I have written. This was very similar…. First build the start bracket using this week’s ratings from my website (www.sixmanfootball.com). Then calculate the probability of each first round game and simulate the result. After each round I update the ratings (not 100% like my formula, but a close enough estimation) and continue…. do this 100,000 times and see what happened. ...

After 100,000 simulations, the Throckmorton Greyhounds appear to have a 29.8% chance to win the UIL D2 Six-Man State Championship. The biggest challenge it appears will be the dominance of the East bracket, which won a dominating 80.1% of the time in the simulation. Yesterday I wrote about how the Crowell Wildcats are a somewhat dominant 33.1% to repeat as the D1 UIL State Six-Man Champions. If you would like to read more details on the methods, I have several posted below. ...

I have created several Monte Carlo simulations over the past year to try and determine probabilities for various sporting events. This week I decided to tackle the Texas Six-Man state tournament. (I will publish more bracket evaluations as the week goes on) For the past 21 seasons, I have been producing rankings for six-man football. For those of you who do not know the history, I would fax my rankings to newspapers across the state and several would actually publish them. I eventually put together a newsletter, The Huntress Report, where I would add scores, game stories, stats and schedules to the rankings and mail (or fax) to subscribers. Eventually I moved to a website, where I would update the information a week behind, so that my subscribers would be getting the freshest information first. That all was scrapped in 1999 when I decided to go 100% to the website (www.sixmanfootball.com). ...

This morning the high school football season officially started with the release of the much anticipated 2014-2016 UIL Football Alignments. This usually started with the UIL servers crashing due to the high volume of traffic (it did briefly, prior to release). This year the UIL was prepared and had a back-up plan to divert traffic off their site. So at exactly 9:00 am, the Twitterverse was alive with the ramblings of everyone who cares about Texas high school football. ...

For the past few months, I have been applying Least Squares Optimization principals to the NFL in making predictions. The method is fairly well established, simply to do and so far — very effective. (here’s a link to the first article explaining it all) Up-To-Date Results In games where the (expected line-actual line)/actual >100%, the line went 15-5 -1 since I started this in week 13 and 2-2 during the playoffs ...

With the first weekend of the NFL Playoffs completed, it seemed like a good time to catch up on how well the Least Squares Optimization predictions did the past two weeks. If this is your first time reading about this, please refer to my initial article here. First, let’s recap the final week of the regular season. Using only the games where the percentage difference between the expected line and the actual lines (from by sportsbook.com when published) was greater than 100%, the predictor went 3-1. In games where the raw absolute value of the expected and actual lines was greater than 2.5, the predictor went 5-3. Overall the predictor went 12-3 (the Bears-Packers game did not have a line sure to the unsure status of Aaron Rodgers. ...

Why isn’t Purdue in the Sugar Bowl? Yes, 1-11 Purdue, with their big time win over Indiana State. It sounds absurd, doesn’t it? But like 118 other teams in the NCAA Division I BCS, they have an indirect win over Alabama (and Auburn for that matter). This is one of the reasons I love college football. You hear all of the talk about how on any given day, TEAM A can beat TEAM B. But we don’t believe it, until some Saturday in the fall, Georgia Southern beats Florida or Appalachian State beats Michigan. ...

With Monday night’s Alamo Bowl being Coach Mack Brown’s final game as coach of the Texas Longhorns, it seemed like a good opportunity to test fan sentiment on the occasion via Twitter. I captured tweets containing certain words in an attempt to follow sentiment towards Mack Brown and Texas over time, leading up to the game, during the game and afterwards for a brief period. I began collecting data around 2:25 PM CST and stopped just after 10:00 PM. The search terms I used were: Mack Brown, mackbrown, Texas Football, Texas Longhorn, hookem and hook em. During that time period, over 51,000 tweets were collected using these search terms. Please not that these terms could be used as regular words, a part of words as well as hashtags. ...

If you have not read any of my previous Least Squared posting, please refer to the initial post here. Week 16 in review: Only one game was in the range where we have been fairly confident on the selections. New England was a favorite in the system, but getting 2.5 points from Vegas. New England destroyed the Ravens, so the >100% difference between the expected and Vegas lines, bring that rule to 12-3 over the past four weeks. ...

There’s no shortage of data out there when it comes to college football, so I decided to take the time to create a least squares model, based on the same principals I have been using for the NFL, and outlined here. The idea was to take all 752 schools that played college football, cross that with all 4138 games that were played (up to last weekend) and see how they predict the games (especially versus the Vegas lines). ...