re: Statistical Game Preview: Louisiana State vs Mississippi State

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Just a question out of curiosity, am I overlooking something or do you adjust for strength of teams played? And if not, do you see a difference in your prediction accuracy early in the season vs. later in the season or do the factors like Vegas line that you take into account usually straighten that out?

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It's taken into account based on the Sagarin Rating and by accounting for the +/- percentage difference in the team's Average Offense versus their already-played opponents average defense.

For example, for Miss State:
Offensive Yards per game = 430.7 ypg
Opponents Yards per game allowed (i.e. teams they've played average defense) = 368.6
So State has a net +16.8% offensive yards versus there season-opponents-played average defense... It's a little clunky but it helps dial it in a bit.

On the other hand:
LSU defense allows = 340.3 ypg
LSU opponent's offenses average = 434.7
Therefore, LSU holds their opponents to -21.7% of their typical offense.

So if you take the Miss St. +16.8% Off and the LSU -21.7% Def, you can see that LSU will probably hold Miss St. under their offensive average for this game, by roughly 5%... (without other variables included)

However, that is only 1 of about 10 other variables put into the calculation.

Anyhow, the calculation / formula is just a fun thing for me and for some discussion. The real nuts and bolts of the comparison is seeing how Team A Offense stacks up to Team B Defense, side-by-side. My first iterations of this comparison (back in 2009) didn't even have the score predictions - it was purely statistics comparisons.