After all my hand-wringing about the state of California college football last week it was a pleasant surprise to see a Sacramento State v. San Jose State matchup on TV Friday night (albeit TruTV).
Sacrament State has raised its profile lately, or maybe I’m just desperate.
Right now we have all the California colleges we can think of in the fixed arrays in the code, but we eliminate the non-FBS schools with a call to remove_fcs_teams early in the find_vconf_games method. The reason for casting a wide net and then removing is because over the years teams bounce back and forth between FBS and FCS. (In the old days there was Division 1-A and 1-AA. In the even older days there was College Division and University Division. CFB stats does a decent job of reifying this history so that one API call gives you “top level” for a decent year.) So when San Diego State was “small school” we don’t let it count but as soon as it bounced up in 1969 it gets into our canonical standings. (Just a reminder we have full yearly results and a whole tag for the Cal State Boom.)
So what does it look like if take that check out and run things with FCS included? Very healthy.
$ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -v
Sacramento State 24 at San José State 42 on Aug 29, 2024
UC Davis 13 at California 31 on Aug 31, 2024
Sacramento State at Fresno State on Sep 06, 2024
Cal Poly at Stanford on Sep 07, 2024
San Diego State at California on Sep 14, 2024
Cal Poly at UC Davis on Oct 12, 2024
San José State at Fresno State on Oct 26, 2024
Sacramento State at Cal Poly on Nov 16, 2024
Stanford at California on Nov 22, 2024
USC at UCLA on Nov 22, 2024
UC Davis at Sacramento State on Nov 23, 2024
Stanford at San José State on Nov 29, 2024
Fresno State at UCLA on Nov 29, 2024
Full Enumeration Simulation:
San José State 345 [17%]
California 311 [15%]
Cal Poly 249 [12%]
Fresno State 232 [11%]
Stanford 229 [11%]
UCLA 188 [9%]
Sacramento State 84 [4%]
UC Davis 16 [1%]
No Winner 394 [19%]
Monte Carlo [Sampled Home Margin Predictor] Simulation:
California 2548 [25%]
San José State 2047 [20%]
Fresno State 1145 [11%]
Stanford 1119 [11%]
UCLA 1055 [11%]
Cal Poly 853 [9%]
Sacramento State 314 [3%]
UC Davis 27 [0%]
No Winner 892 [9%]
At least one missing element error prevents Elo Predictor from finishing:
no Elo for Sacramento State
California 1-0
San José State 1-0
UC Davis 0-1
Sacramento State 0-1
2024, 13, ,
For one thing it takes the possibility of the dreaded “No Winner” down to only 19% of full enumeration results. This is also a particularly good year for this since all the Bay Area FBS schools are playing a California FCS school, which hasn’t happened in a while. So we actually have some crossover. Without that, of course, it would be possible for an FCS school to just run up a record without playing “up” once.
(As you can see the output dies on Elo simulation because collegefootballdata.com doesn’t keep Elo for FCS teams.)
I don’t think I’m ready to change the rules for good but if an FCS school wins the title this year with a schedule that includes an FBS win we’ll make an executive decision and scratch their name onto the cup.