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Who Have They Played?! (Comparing teams through statistical analysis)

If I could do that AND a half a hundred other things, then I might bet real money on sports.

I don't.

I've done this kind of analysis for years, and the most consistent lesson I've learned from it, is that I am beyond blessed that gambling holds no allure for me whatsoever.

If I were to start gambling, what I would probably do is crank up the old DSA-for-all-of-FBS spreadsheets and then bet on every game where it looks like Vegas has made the biggest mistake, but bet in the OPPOSITE direction of what the spreadsheets tell me. I bet that would be by far the best "system" that I could come up with. It might even make me money.

I'll stick with engineering.

The thing that the sharps have that the rest of us don't is NOT a superior numerical model. It's contacts. The guys who actually make money at this consistently are guys who have contacts all over a given conference. So when a quarterback's girlfriend gets flown out to Maui by a professional athlete and the guys who THINK they're sharp find out about it before the game, the REALLY sharp guys knew that he was dating that kind of woman weeks ago and were the reason the line moved BEFORE the almost-sharps found out where the girl was and long before the rest of us were wondering why the kid threw 4 interceptions.

That's just one overly specific example of a thousand things that can wreak havoc with any numerically-based prediction. If you don't have contacts, stop donating your money to people who do.
And even then those pesky turnovers would get in the way a good bit of the time. Nobody could've predicted for example that OSU would be the beneficiary of a +4 turnover margin against Iowa. When a variable as strongly correlated with winning as turnovers is largely random, we're in trouble trying to make predictions.
 
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This is all good 'n well, but...

Too much time on stats. Not enough time in the barcalounger writing pithy things about the nacho babe.

I'll bet you that @heisman will bring GPAs back if you write an update about the nacho babe.
Why did they go away in the first place? Was Clarity the only one who knew how to hand them out?
 
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