Intro and New Mexico Bowl Stats

Good morning everyone, and welcome to the 6th annual College Bowl Pool.  This promises to be the last ever pool that we can operate under this style since next year, I believe, they are going to a 4-team playoff.  I think that only means that there is an extra game where we don't know the participants, so it may not be as big an adjustment as I think it will be.

But that's next year.  This year we have 35 games over the next fortnight plus 2 days.  I was looking at last years' final standings, which is a good place to start gauging this year.  The winner last year managed to get 483 total points and 26/35 games right.  That's good for 76%, so don't get too worked up about missing a game or two early.  Everyone will miss games.

I was looking at the point spreads for all the games, and 7 of them are 10 points or more.  I'm sure that these are going to be highly correlated to the teams with the most points taken in the pool.  The largest point spread is Baylor -17 vs. UCF.  Baylor currently has the 2nd most points on it, so it seems like most people at least looked at the point spreads in making selections.

It also looks like no team went un-picked this year.  Currently, the lowest number of people who picked a team is Oklahoma (vs. Alabama) with 2.  It's a strange thing to see a team that is usually as good as Oklahoma being picked so infrequently, but such is the fate of the football gods.

There are 14 total games where one team is favored by 7 points or more.  I tend to think that those games are harder to pick against the favorite, but anything less than a touchdown seems more like a toss up to me.  That leaves 21 games that Vegas thinks will be decided by less than a TD.  I tend to think it's how well people pick in those games that will determine the winner.  The only exception to that rule is if you happen to be one of the particularly insightful people that nails a huge upset and gains a ton of points on the field.  You may need to do both.

Either way, I hope that even if your picks do lousy that it gives you an excuse to watch some games that you wouldn't otherwise care about.  God knows, I wind up watching most of these games, even if I had no idea that some of these teams played D1 football.

It appears as though the football schedulers have decided to ease us into Bowl season with 4 bowls that virtually no one cares about.  Of the 35 games on the schedule, today's bowl games rank 23rd (Las Vegas Bowl), 32nd (New Mexico Bowl), 34th (Idaho Potato Bowl), and 35th (New Orleans Bowl).  That's not a lot of points at stake overall today, so people can probably just relax and let the college football wash over them as the games slowly invade your lives.  There will be time later on to stress out about games.  Today doesn't seem to be one of those days.

But kickoff has taken place and we are off...  The first game is the New Mexico Bowl, and if you read above, you already know that this Bowl is not really all that high on anyone's radar.

The game is between Washington State and Colorado State.  The Vegas line was Washington State by 6, which, if you only went by the Vegas line should put the median at Washington State for 19 points, but in our pool the median is Washington State for 2 points.  The mean is Washington State for 2.44 points.  This seems quite a bit off from the Vegas line, but I think that part of that is the people that went 1-35 on the picks.  54 people took Washington State (avg points: 10.52) and 30 people took Colorado State (avg. points: 12.10).  So the people that took Colorado State liked them more than the favorite.  It's risky, but it might work.

Only 3 people have this game in their top 10.  Jim W. has Washington State for 26, so if that happens, he'll be in the lead for at least one game.  The other 2 people  that have a high score for this game are Ally H. (30) & Bosun Ava (29).  Those last 2 are among my favorite pickers.  I'll openly pull for them to do well. 

Those that are astute and good at math probably picked up on the fact that there are 84 entries this year.  That's slightly more than last years' 80, so that's slight improvement.  It also means the prize pool = 84 * 5 = $420.  The distribution will be:

1st: $210.00

2nd:$126.00

3rd: $84.00

Good luck to everyone!!!!!