[stupac2]

King stays to one side of the field, so will cover whomever is on his side.

As for games to watch, I like to watch teams that match up more similarly with who the next game's opponent is, style wise.  Don't know enough about Stanford to say for sure, but a true representation of our team was seen vs. Michigan St (minus Canzeri).  Beyond that, I would take a look at the closer games such as Minnesota or Indiana to see how we react when the game's on the line.  I don't know how much there is to learn in blowouts, but you can get a good look at our 3rd string RB Wadley in the Northwestern game.

This got me curious, so I decided to try to make a "similarity score" for Stanford. I took the FEI ratings and used a sum of the squares of the differences between Stanford's raw offensive, defensive, special teams, and FVE (roughly field position advantage) rankings to come up with a single number that represents how similar teams are to Stanford overall. The closest P5 team is Notre Dame and farthest away is Boston College, which I think actually jibes pretty well with what I would've guessed.

Anyway, the closest team to Stanford that Iowa played, by this metric, is MSU, though they're all the way down at #22 closest. Nebraska is next at #28, followed closely by Pittsburgh at #29 and Indiana at #31. Minnesota and Illinois are pretty far down the list at 54 and 58, respectively.

So I suppose those are the games to prioritize, at least by this metric. I think I'll go through and find the most similar offenses and defenses to see if that turns up anything different.

[stupac2]

King stays to one side of the field, so will cover whomever is on his side.

As for games to watch, I like to watch teams that match up more similarly with who the next game's opponent is, style wise.  Don't know enough about Stanford to say for sure, but a true representation of our team was seen vs. Michigan St (minus Canzeri).  Beyond that, I would take a look at the closer games such as Minnesota or Indiana to see how we react when the game's on the line.  I don't know how much there is to learn in blowouts, but you can get a good look at our 3rd string RB Wadley in the Northwestern game.

This got me curious, so I decided to try to make a "similarity score" for Stanford. I took the FEI ratings and used a sum of the squares of the differences between Stanford's raw offensive, defensive, special teams, and FVE (roughly field position advantage) rankings to come up with a single number that represents how similar teams are to Stanford overall. The closest P5 team is Notre Dame and farthest away is Boston College, which I think actually jibes pretty well with what I would've guessed.

Anyway, the closest team to Stanford that Iowa played, by this metric, is MSU, though they're all the way down at #22 closest. Nebraska is next at #28, followed closely by Pittsburgh at #29 and Indiana at #31. Minnesota and Illinois are pretty far down the list at 54 and 58, respectively.

So I suppose those are the games to prioritize, at least by this metric. I think I'll go through and find the most similar offenses and defenses to see if that turns up anything different.