Why the Numbers Trust Michigan, But Favor Nebraska

In college football, everyone is looking for an edge. Whether it's the coaches, players, or even those diving into the data side of things, the search is on. This week on the I-80 Football Show, Parker Fleming, the Head of Analytics at Blueprint Sports, joined Josh Peterson to talk about college football analytics; what stats matter, which ones are underrated, and how he got into the business.

Inside the podcast, he broke down Nebraska's game with Michigan and why the unknowns in Nebraska actually have him leaning slightly to pick the Cornhuskers. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.

Josh: Nebraska has started 3-0. Michigan has started 2-1. They're playing this weekend at 2.30. It's interesting because Nebraska had this close game in the opener versus another power school. And then, you mentioned Akron earlier. Woof. And then they play an FCS school in Houston Christian.

Meanwhile, Michigan plays a couple of directional schools. One of them, this past weekend, went a lot better than the one in week one, and they have the loss to Oklahoma. Trying to strip away the noise, as you called it a few minutes ago, what are you seeing with this? Because Nebraska looked so good the last two weeks. And as someone who does four hours of radio every day and multiple podcasts a week, I'm still trying to figure out “what did I actually learn about them?” given the opposition that they played.

Parker: So, I want to be respectful of everyone's opinions and fandoms; Cincinnati probably should have won that game. I think you look at Brendan Sorsby in that final throw, that was an interception, and that route that is going, it's like, dude, you throw it to the outside of your receiver or you throw it over your receiver's head. Just don't throw it to that one spot. And he threw it to that one spot, and the receiver was wide open. It was absolutely there. It's a hard throw. Sorsby is who he is, and you know, he should make that throw more often than he doesn't, but he didn't make it there. And I think that game was uncomfortably close for Nebraska against a team that shouldn't have been.

Malcolm Hartzog's game-winning interception is the difference from 3-0 and 2-1. | Dylan Widger-Imagn Images

So I was a little bit worried about what they were doing, and maybe they were caught up in the Chiefs of it all in the Arrowhead, and it's a big environment, and there's some nonsense there. But I think in general, we're seeing, “year three Matt Rhule” is the joke and how much he can develop. But a guy who truly understands development and has been able to balance really well the understanding of development versus bringing in [players from the] portal and kind of reshuffling and filling your needs.

They brought in Patrick Stewart from New England to kind of help them with the financial and the planning side of that; really, really interesting. And I think looking at Nebraska and looking at what they're doing this year, you know, you can look at their offensive statistics; they’re top 15 in EPA per play, top 12 in success rate. Over 53% success rate. Some of that is, you know, poor opponents and kind of what you're adjusting for there, but I think they're making the right steps.

Looking at both of them this weekend and looking at kind of how I think about this matchup between two teams that have dramatically different profiles and are kind of at different places with Michigan, you know, losing so much and kind of struggling last year. My thought was to look at their three games and kind of understand what's the probability that their results were just due to randomness. I'm gonna have to explain this, and I've texted this to two people. This is the third time I'm saying this out loud, but I've done this and we're getting it live.

I was thinking about Florida specifically, and I'll get back to Nebraska and Michigan here in a minute, but like Florida saying, “if the market accurately priced Florida in all three games and we knew their pre-season spread, what's the probability that those games were just random variants? Like, “oh darn, you just get a bad draw every so often and the South Florida game was a bad draw.” You take the pregame probability, you take the actual win margin, and you do a normal cumulative distribution function and say, what's the probability you win by at least X if you were favored by this?

And so that's a lot of nonsense to say, I came up with a single number to say, how reliable can we trust your first three games? How much can we say, “hey, these are just random variants,” or “no, we're pretty confident that you are who you are and what you've shown on the field?” So, for Florida, it was like a 0.87% chance that they would get those results randomly. They're bad. They're overpriced by the market. They're bad.

But looking at Nebraska and looking at Michigan, Nebraska, their probability of their result being due to randomness was 23.8%. So that's a high level of uncertainty. That's saying about a quarter of the time, if you were just flipping a coin for those three games, you'd win three, right? And so with Nebraska, we're saying, “Ah, we're not actually sure that their results aren't just variants or that they've actually shown me something.”

Dylan Raiola prepares for a snap in Nebraska's 68-0 win over Akron. — All eyes will be on Dylan Raiola against Michigan. | Kenny Larabee, KLIN

Whereas with Michigan, there's a 1.9 % chance that their results would be due to variance. So we're saying, “Oh, Michigan is actually better.” Like they're actually better than what we've seen, what we thought, and what the market priced them.

So that's something I'm watching going into this is kind of understanding at this point, I actually trust Michigan a little bit more than I trust Nebraska just because there's a lot more uncertainty around Nebraska's performances. That being said, based on the preseason priors, I do have this very, very close. I do have Nebraska favored 51%. It's such a close toss-up that home-field advantage is making the decision here.

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