What is this?

This page displays predictions for games in the 2018 CFB season. These predictions come from a model built on historical college football play by play and game data in order to simulate upcoming games. All data is from collegefootballdata.com.

To see regular season win projections and conference championship / playoff / national championship probabilities for all teams as of this week, go to:

1 Week 15 Predictions

This table displays the results of simulating week 15 of the 2018 CFB season params$nsims times. These simulations are run one week in advance, using information available through week 14. Quality is the (harmonic) mean of the two team’s overall rating, with 100 indicating a game between highly rated opponents. Pr(HomeWin) is the percentage of times that the home team won the game across every simulation.

2 Results Through Week 14

How has the model performed so far in2018?

2.1 Assessment

The model predicts the probability that the home team will win and their expected margin of victory (or defeat). I assess the model’s performance by assessing the accuracy of its predictions (win/loss), the logloss of its probabilities, and the mean absolute error of the margin.

			Outcome	Margin
2018	1	88	0.82	0.41	16.4
2018	2	78	0.78	0.38	15.2
2018	3	66	0.79	0.43	14.3
2018	4	62	0.76	0.46	13.0
2018	5	58	0.76	0.47	11.8
2018	6	56	0.73	0.54	13.5
2018	7	55	0.69	0.57	14.5
2018	8	55	0.82	0.44	12.8
2018	9	56	0.54	0.67	13.8
2018	10	62	0.68	0.54	14.2
2018	11	62	0.84	0.46	11.8
2018	12	66	0.82	0.39	13.6
2018	13	64	0.72	0.55	14.4
2018	14	9	0.78	0.47	14.4
Season Average:	0.75	0.48	13.9

2.2 Results

3 Predicting the Rest of the Season

This table displays the results of simulating the rest of the 2018 season times. These simulations are run weeks in advance, where the remainder of the season is simulated using only the information as of week 14.

For example, we simulate the entire season before any games are played by simulating week two based on the (simulated) results of week one, then simulating week three based on the (simulated) results from week two. As a result, predictions for future weeks tend to be less accurate than predictions made one week in advance and are likely to change as we get closer to the actual game.

Predicting 2018 CFB Games

2022-08-21