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Introduction
Do you hate math? Do you also hate crude attempts to over-quantify something with tremendous uncertainty? Well, you’re in the wrong place then. But, since you’re already here, might as well stick around and see what my computer says is going to happen in each Penn State game during the 2021 season.
Last year, I developed a system (WAR) that allows us to estimate a team’s offensive, defensive, and overall efficiencies based on previous game-by-game performances. For the most part, it’s a useful retrospective tool that can also effectively predict the outcome of future games. In some unpublished work, I used this method to predict the entire 2019-2020 bowl calendar. Out of 39 games, my system correctly picked 31 straight-up winners (79%), 25 winners against-the-spread (64%), and 20 O/U (51%). Yes, it was a really small sample size, but that trial run showed there’s some potential in this system as a prognosticating tool.
Now, the obvious benefit of using this system during bowl season is that you have at least 12 games worth of recent data. In this exercise – forecasting each 2021 Penn State game – all our data is pretty dusty. Except for injuries, opt-outs, or suspensions, the bowl team is THE team. In August, the team is some amount of last year’s squad and coaching staff blended with new recruits, new transfers, and new schemes. Throw in COVID-related schedule and roster variances throughout college football from 2020, and this exercise gets even more difficult.
So, before we start, an ask of you dear reader – don’t nitpick this. Teams go up and down every year and some meet expectations, some exceed expectations, and some are Michigan (i.e. constantly underperforming). The dog days of August aren’t the best time to try and predict what will happen in November or December, but we’re doing it anyway. So don’t bust open your piggybanks just yet. This is nothing more than some fodder as we sweat through summer and await the fall.
