Posted by orangepace on 4/1/2016 1:27:00 PM (view original):
Great work Aaron. How did we swing an 8-5 record though?! You know me better than that!!
Yeah... I saw that, along with a few other anomalies - like me still being ranked #1.
The completely honest, but unsatisfying, answer is that your 3-game losing streak from last season affected your Coach Effect rating adversely. Combined with your tough OOC and brutal in-conference schedule, it was likely enough to swing your projection from, say, a 12-1 or 13-0 type of season to this abysmal 8-5 nonsense.
To be more specific, you're giving away points (from a CE perspective, not from a roster talent perspective) in 8 of your 9 human contests. Two of those 8 are also teams with "better talent" than yours, while three of the remaining five are nipping at your heels in talent. Combine those and it looks like my projection system has you with two blow-out losses and three toss-up type losses.
My projection system is good, but still far from perfect. I haven't had the time to invest in a more thorough solution, so it's going to do things like project Northern Arizona to have six losses last season... or Tennessee Tech to have five losses this season. Intuitively, we know this won't be the case. I probably need to revisit the CE calculations I'm using. It currently uses an old, very crude method that really fails to capture much context. I have a better method in which you fared
significantly better. But that method is not automated and it's time-consuming, so I only run it for D-IAA. Until I can better automate it and roll it out for all divisions, we're stuck with the crude method. Sorry.
FYI, in the crude method, you were ranked the #35 coach in D-IAA with a +1 (points per game) effect. In the better method, you were the #6 coach in D-IAA, with the +16 PPG effect. That would've made all the difference and put you at likely 12-1. Even this better method likely underappreciates your coaching prowess, but we cannot simply overlook the three losses, which are what kept you from having a dominant, #1-level rating.
(And, as usual, I spent a completely inordinate amount of words to answer a question that could've been summed up in a few sentences. That's the engineer in me.)
4/1/2016 3:57 PM (edited)