Spring Game - Printable Version

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RE: Spring Game - martyup - 04-11-2022

We'll beat the weenies.

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RE: Spring Game - Spiny_Norman - 04-11-2022

(04-11-2022, 08:15 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote:  Stanford even scheduled its bye week after its second game. Not real smart for a thin team.

Bye week scheduling is out of Stanford's control. The P12 conference office schedules bye weeks.

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RE: Spring Game - msqueri - 04-11-2022

(04-11-2022, 08:15 AM)OutsiderFan Wrote:  Ask me if I consider Colgate a real game. Winless means against all teams not named Colgate, which is just a joke for Stanford to be playing. If you want to play an FCS team, play Portland State, UC Davis, Sac State, Montana, etc. Stanford even scheduled its bye week after its second game. Not real smart for a thin team.

But, I love how nobody addressed why I said Stanford would go winless; if it can't run the ball in dominant fashion in its Spring Scrimmage, and nobody argued Stanford did run the ball well in Spring scrimmage. Just fixate on arguing how winless is impossible because Colgate.

Tell me the difference in reaction if Stanford were to go 1-11 vs. 0-12. So it seems pretty silly to me to be harping on why gong winless is a crazy thing to say, rather than entertain what could make someone say going winless is a possibility, with no substantive objection against the assertion. Did ya'll notice how the only argument against going winless was fixated on freaking Colgate? Nobody is making an argument Stanford might beat USC, Washington, Oregon, Oregon State, ASU, Notre Dame, UCLA, WSU, Utah, Cal, or BYU, are they?

A few of us fixated on the winless comment because it was so off-base as to call your credibility into question. We play a game that counts next year against a team we'll beat. That's not "winless." If you forgot we were playing Colgate and said something ill-considered as a result, that's fine, just say it. And then in this post you made another egregious factual error assuming Stanford "schedules" its bye weeks. But I'm happy to respond to your post on the other merits.

Drawing conclusions positive or negative from a Spring Game is daft. Stanford wasn't playing with anything resembling its offense or anything resembling its defense and it wasn't real football (where there are two teams with an offense and a defense that battle over possession and QBs are allowed to get hit and.....) and practice never means that much anyway. We learned nothing Saturday with the possible exception of some low-confidence arrows up or down on individual players. Regarding the quality of one unit in relation to another, you just can't learn anything from a handful of practice plays involving players who won't play a meaningful role in our team this season. One can imagine with ease, for instance, that when the offense has Jayson Raines and David Kasemervisz at wide receiver that doesn't exactly create looks that are going to make the defense - which knows our personnel well having played against it - fear the pass.

My views on the 2022 Stanford team will not be based in a positive or negative way on Saturday's fan fest with some scrimmage plays thrown in. But I do have views on how many games we're likely to win. I think it is going to be a handful but more than one (and definitely more than zero). Here are a few data points for consideration:

Bill Connelly's SP+ had the following rankings for 2022:

8) Notre Dame
14) Utah
23) BYU
31) Arizona State
32) Oregon
44) UCLA
46) Oregon State
61) Washington
64) USC
68) Stanford
70) Washington State
74) Cal
99) Arizona - Stanford doesn't play
102) Colorado - Stanford doesn't play
N/A) Colgate

Adjusting for home field advantage, that would make Colgate, Cal, Washington State, USC (I am personally more bullish on them than Connelly is, and he acknowledges what a wildcard USC is), and Oregon State winnable games with Stanford favored in 3-5 games.

I think a better way to think about it might be in terms of win probabilities. Because Sagarin assigns point spreads to comparisons between teams and also has a numerical home field advantage factor, it is possible to use his rankings to develop a solid back-of-the-envelope estimate of win probabilities. Assuming every team is exactly as good in 2022 as they were in 2021 (which obviously won't happen but is a decent heuristic, and certainly casts Stanford in an unflattering light), here are the probabilities for victory for 2022 using a three point home field advantage factor (the historical norm but in 2021 it was only a 1.96 point advantage so it's possible these probabilities below all overrate the home teams by a few percentage points):

Colgate - 100 percent

USC - 47 percent

@ Washington - 27 percent

@ Oregon - 8 percent

Oregon State - 34 percent

@ Notre Dame - 0 percent

Arizona State - 26 percent

@ UCLA - 11 percent

Washington State - 34 percent

@ Utah - 0 percent

@ Cal - 25 percent

BYU - 25 percent

Expected Wins: 3.37


If Stanford is as bad in 2022 as we were in 2021, which I think you and I both think distinctly possible, we should expect 2-5 wins. I think your assertions might be based on a sense that other than Colgate you wouldn't have us favored in any individual game. But over the course of a season that's not how win probabilities work. If you have a 25 percent chance in every game you're very likely going to win several.

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RE: Spring Game - SamuelMcF - 04-11-2022

Exactly what Matt said. If you have a 25% chance of winning each of 11 games, your expected win total is 3.

Same idea as it also being very very hard to go undefeated even when you're favored in every single game. If you have a 90% chance of winning each of 12 games, your expected win total is not 12. It's just under 11. Ask Alabama, who was favored in every regular season game and still lost to A&M while favored by 18.

The spring game meant nothing. One of the first quotes from Shaw in his post-game interview was “We took a lot of the things we’ve been working on and didn’t show them today, for obvious reasons." EJ SMITH ONLY RAN THE BALL FOUR TIMES. The first-team O was out there for only like 3-4 series in total. It was a glorified practice that was as vanilla as can be, which is impressive given who the playcaller is. Also a final note that the defensive shift to a 4-3 is directly meant to be better against the run (4 down linemen).

Now keep in mind none of this changes the fact that we will still likely be bad, but my win prediction is not 1. It's more like 4, since Shaw will still somehow beat a team he shouldn't (see: Oregon).

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