I knew what the Monte Carlo feature looked like in my head but I got bogged down reading the wikipedia article. Ultimately the season-simulator I’m thinking of is what I think something like 538 is using: best-guess probabilistic model to assign probabilities of the discrete event outcomes (games) overall evaluator that can determine larger season… Continue reading stuck in Monte Carlo
Category: code
Ties for the win
The objectively terrible overtime game between Penn State and Illinois made us all think about how we miss ties: I think the current swing is a more mundane generational shift: The last tie in college football was in 1995 before the new overtime rules took effect the next year. Ties became associated with the recently… Continue reading Ties for the win
Simulating outcomes
As expected the recursion at the core was fun and a little bit magical: For the faked outcomes we use the very scorigami-ish score of 55-4. Obviously since margins of victory matter in our final tiebreaker system we can either go crazy and simulate many different scores or just pick one for the enumeration. Here’s… Continue reading Simulating outcomes
Meaningful games in November
Mea culpa in not realizing last week that SDSU’s “home” game was actually played in Carson. That’s (partially) why the line didn’t reflect a true home field advantage for SDSU and indeed it moved more toward Fresno at game time and Fresno did win convincingly. Gambling advice is for entertainment only! Fresno and San Diego… Continue reading Meaningful games in November
command line params
For too long I’ve been letting the main executable limp along in “developer mode,” where you have to edit the file to change some params. I bit the bullet and read up on python3 argument parsing and of course it wasn’t that bad. Here’s the diff. I used the argparse module, billed in the official… Continue reading command line params
They play football in Texas too
Let’s test the portability of the “virtual conference” API. I added a canned dictionary of Texas teams to the python executable. Inside the API code I also added the final tiebreaker, total margin. As identified last week this was technically in the rules but never came up in the California runs so far. This code… Continue reading They play football in Texas too
Extra home games for some college teams
After looking through dozens of wikipedia season summaries one trend that jumps out is lots of early home games for teams like Michigan. 2016 is an extreme example: They didn’t play a road game until week 6. This year they just played their first road game in week 5. Why? And is it just Michigan?… Continue reading Extra home games for some college teams
new output for a year in progress
I implemented the fix I mentioned in the last results post and instead of having to chop up the code to get a nice run for this year it now does it automatically. Latest verbose run for 2021: San José State 7 at USC 30 on Sep 04, 2021 Stanford 42 at USC 28 on… Continue reading new output for a year in progress
anatomy of a timezone fix
Timezone bugs and libraries are always hilarious fun so let’s take a look at what I did and what I should still do before I forget it. The diff in question. The timestamps in the database are in UTC time. So it should be a simple enough matter to parse them as UTC and then… Continue reading anatomy of a timezone fix
The 1970s cal state football explosion
When I started researching this I vaguely thought that the recent past would be mostly the usual Pac-8/10/12 suspects plus the Cal State schools that play now. I thought the really crazy years would be the 1940s when Naval Officer schools in California port cities were playing major college football. (And they will be, I… Continue reading The 1970s cal state football explosion