We will have a new champ. Stanford and USC’s long duopoly ended Saturday with the thrashings each received at home. That’s been a common theme this year. Take a look at the home/road splits starting 10 years ago for games within our Mythical California Cup “virtual conference”: $ python3 ./home_road_splits.py -s 2011 totals for year… Continue reading home stretch
Category: results
real games
We finally get some real California Cup games back this week with the LA and Bay Area rivalry games. I also added some more “real game” sauce to the Monte Carlo sampled margin predictor. Instead of just margins I checked in a fixed array representing 10 years of actual game scores from MCC games. Thus… Continue reading real games
stuck in Monte Carlo
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
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
MCC Gameday is going to San Diego
I have probably spent about 17 minutes of my life total actually watching College Gameday and many hours reading commentary and reaction about where they have picked the next site to be. Not surprisingly, I find a semi-arbitrary third-party decision awarding some trivial crown based on week-to-week results and behind-the-scenes intrigue compelling. Before we get… Continue reading MCC Gameday is going to San Diego
1958 Cal vs. Pacific
It’s an inescapable fact of California (the state) football that the last time California (the school) went to a Rose Bowl was January 1, 1959. (There was some unpleasantness in 2004.) Since that 1958 season was something of a high water mark for Cal surely they must have won the Mythical California Cup that year… Continue reading 1958 Cal vs. Pacific
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
Is this the year for SDSU?
Current 2021 results and standings: San José State 7 at USC 30 on Sep 04, 2021 Stanford 42 at USC 28 on Sep 11, 2021 Fresno State 40 at UCLA 37 on Sep 18, 2021 UCLA 35 at Stanford 24 on Sep 25, 2021 San Diego State at San José State on Oct 15, 2021… Continue reading Is this the year for SDSU?