For this week's issue of ESPN the Magazine, I ran projections for each of the non-championship BCS bowl games using a new methodology I have recently developed. KC Joyner provided the write-ups and identified an x-factor for each game.

My current FEI projection method is almost exclusively a function of the overall FEI rating of the two teams in a given match-up. For this new projection methodology, I identified 25 separate metrics that comprise a team's overall efficiency profile in the same manner as described in the similarity score methodology I published here at Football Outsiders a few weeks ago. Instead of comparing a team to every other team of the last five years, I compared each game matchup to every other game matchup of the last five years, 7152 in all. The projection was then based on the 100 most similar games, producing a projected scoring distributions, a mean score projection, and a win likelihood for each game.

I'll be tracking the success of this new methodology against my old methodology throughout the bowl season.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 13 Dec 2012

2 comments, Last at 01 Feb 2013, 5:06am by Anonymousquicken