OUR (ESTIMATED) PROSPECTS IN A HANDY GRAPHIC FORMAT
Just a brief diary this week about what the statistical crystal ball might hold for the remainder of the season.
For those of you who regularly check Massey and Sagarin and other sites which calculate ratings and/or projected win probabilities, you may have already figured this out, but for those of you that aren’t in the habit or have not yet dared to dream (a terrible dream, of course) at looking through these stats, here’s the current estimate.
In all seriousness, of course, we’re not quite doomed yet, although it would be fair to say that our chances at redemption grow fainter by the game, and by redemption, I mean at least gaining a berth in a certain bowl which, if you live in Metro Detroit, is within rather convenient driving distance. Actually, that’s probably not a conventional definition of the term “redemption”, so we’ll just keep it at “bowl eligible” and leave it for now.
Here’s the matrix – blue indicates a hypothetical win, with each number being the Massey estimate of this occurring (numbers current as of yesterday mid-morning). The estimated probability of each of the remaining possible combinations of wins and losses is in the final column:
So, yeah, the most likely single combinations of events is beating Indiana and then cruising to a cool 4-8 mark on the year, followed by losing out and going 3-9. After that, the next most likely combination would put us at 5-7 with wins against Indiana and Maryland. You can see where this is going, of course. Our collective chances of winning X number of games are below:
Bowl eligibility – 3 or 4 wins – currently sits at 12.18%. Hypothetically, if we beat Indiana, the chances at becoming bowl eligible rise to 20.06% if no other numbers change. If we lose on Saturday, the estimate on bowl eligibility would fall to a very manageable (if you want to call it that) 1.73% - if we don’t change any of the other probabilities in the matrix.