If he's 90% right with his projections--which is pretty good--there are 13 teams that are going to defy his projections in one way or another. Even if he's 100% right in his projections, you'll have a team or two hit those 1% projections--which would be 7 wins for us.
And, even with good forecasting, he's not going to be 100% right. Our hope for this season is to be an outlier and break the models.
Well just off a very brief study I found 9 teams (UNC, Miami, Pitt, Wake Forest, Michigan, Indiana, Cincinnati, Baylor, Oklahoma State).
5 of his preseason top 13 teams didn’t even finish ranked last year. (#7 Iowa State [7-6], #8 Miami [7-5], #10 Florida [6-7], #12 North Carolina [6-7], #13 Texas [5-7]). LSU, TCU, and USC all finished the year with losing records. That’s 6 of his top 25 who finished with losing records. Not even unranked, but absolute losing records. That’s 24%, or basically 1/4 of his top 25 who lost more games than they won.
NC State was projected at 6 wins, and they finished the year ranked 18th at 9-3. Arkansas was projected at less than 6 wins and they finished 9-4 ranked 19th.
I mean, it’s really not all that hard to guess that good teams from last year will be good again, and bad teams will be bad again. These projections show basically nothing new. Just by looking at the preseason top 25 compared to the postseason top 25 I’ve picked out 17 teams he was completely wrong on. If you really dive deep into the numbers you can easily find more.
Like I said, these metrics rely
heavily on what happened last year. That doesn’t make them bad, or make what he’s doing useless. It just means to take them with a large grain of salt. Especially for GT fans, don’t look at these numbers and think we have no chance this year.
