Team Selection Analysis

With the exception of the Army-Navy game last week, the college football regular season has been a wrap for a couple weeks now.  That has given us a chance to catch our breath and look back on the season.  It’s fun to look back at the trends of people picking teams prior to the season starting.  There are some interesting pieces of information that has come out of looking back at how people picked their rosters.  There are some charts showing the most popular teams picked and where all the teams came from.  It’s interesting to see that a team like Iowa was chosen nearly as many times as either Florida St. or Oregon.  There is always the task of trying to project a team’s performance versus the cost of adding them as one of your 10 teams.  It is a real tough value analysis.  Many people clearly viewed Iowa as a high value pick.  Although, if you would have done any perusing of Iowa football message boards, all the Iowa fans knew the season wasn’t going to be as good as most publications predicted.  Iowa is terrible with high expectations, and always exceed low expectations.  There is no statistical, measurable reason for it.  It’s just one of those things that is a “gut feel” about a team.

Some noteworthy items before you get to the graphics.  3 of the 4 playoff teams were well represented.  Florida St. and Oregon were 2 of the top 3 most popular picks, while Alabama was still in the top 18.  Ohio St. was only picked 4 times across all 3 leagues.  Guess what?  Ohio St. was the highest scoring team after the regular season.  Georgia Southern ended up being the 15th highest scoring team and they were picked 1 time.  Louisiana Tech ended up being a top 20 scoring team and not a single person picked them.  UTSA was a very popular pick and they finished 113th in scoring.  They were valued at 510 before the season.  Should have went with Utah at 500.  Utah ended up scoring 357 more points than UTSA, but not one lonely soul picked Utah.  Just some fun facts for you.  I’m not going to do all your statistical analysis for you.