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Saturday, December 27, 2014

Creating an NCAAF Model as a Function of Stadium Size

My friend roommate colleague (who's also my friend and roommate), "Stan Hooper", suggested that a decent model for predicting college football game outcomes would be rating teams based on the sizes of their stadiums.

I took the size of each team's stadium and predicted the winner of each game simply by which team had the larger capacity. I factored in home-field advantage by adding the average stadium capacity to the home team's stadium size (home-field advantage in terms of points is 3.5, which is approximately the average margin of victory by home teams (this season is 3.78)) in this equation.

On the season, the Home-Field Model predicted 60.96% of straight up winners. For comparison, my MDS Model predicted 71.71% correctly, and Vegas tabbed 75.11% correctly. Honestly I'm just relieved that a model created in 30 seconds by importing a Wikipedia page into a spreadsheet didn't beat the one I worked an entire semester on.

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