Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

We have reached the first gameday of the 2008 season, and Vanderbilt is still a 3 to 4 point underdog to the Miami Redhawks. But why?

Vanderbilt has the most obvious edge in this game, and that is the defensive secondary. DJ Moore led the SEC in interceptions last year, 4-year starter Reshard “Scud” Langford anchors the unit from strong safety, and many expect Myron Lewis to step up for a breakout season. CFN ranked the unit as the #3 unit of defensive backs in the entire country! No joke, check the link — the list actually goes “Ohio State, USC, Vanderbilt, Georgia…” Those other three teams are serious contenders for a national title, in case you’ve been living under a rock for a month or two.

So Vandy has a unit that is among the elite of NCAA football. What do the Redhawks have going for them?

(1) Home Field Advantage — the convention is that home field advantage in college football is worth about 3 points, which coincedentally is almost the exact spread between VU and Miami in this game. However, Vanderbilt isn’t really that familiar with this concept. In the last couple of years, the opponents that VU has played both home and away (SEC East teams plus Ole Miss, Alabama, and Wake Forest) have performed better in Nashville than on the road! Maybe that’s because Vanderbilt has the smallest home field edge in the SEC, but I think it also has something to do with the mentality this team (and coaching staff) takes to road games. Whatever the reason, betting on the road team in every VU game for the last 3 or 4 years would have made you some money. Are Miami fans REALLY counting on their home field advantage?

(2) Miami’s linebacker corps — Unlike Vanderbilt, who graduated NFL talents Jon Goff and Marcus Buggs after last season, Miami returns all three of its linebackers, and all are highly touted in MAC circles. They are the strength of the Miami team. But does this present the same kind of edge that Vanderbilt’s secondary does? Certainly not. Exhibit A is Vanderbilt’s rushing performance against this same group of linebackers last year, when the passing game was less than threatening. 18 rushing first downs, 300 yards gained rushing on 5.4 yards per carry, and 3 TDs. Exhibit B is, once again, CFN’s unit rankings – Miami’s LBs may be the class of the MAC, but they would be dead in the middle of the pack in the SEC. Better than Vanderbilt’s, but merely typical of Vanderbilts’ opponents.

(3) Special teams — This is the biggest legitimate edge that Miami has over Vanderbilt. In a game expected to be low scoring, field position and the ability to make FGs becomes even more important. Last season, Vanderbilt was worst in the SEC in net yards per punt with less than 33 yards per punt. The Dores were also subpar in punt returns and only 13 for 20 on FG attempts. And if you open the box labelled “memorable Vanderbilt defeats”, special teams certainly play a role — remember the blocked FG against MTSU a few seasons back, or the roughing of UT’s punter last year?

(4) Offensive Line — If you’re reading one of the couple dozen season previews that consist of nothing but well-packaged oversimplifications, you might read that Vanderbilt has the least experienced offensive line in NCAA football. While it’s true that Vanderbilt lost all five of last year’s starters, there is more to be said about this year’s unit. We’re talking about a group of juniors with real playing experience. And if you’re a VandySports subscriber, you already know that Coach Bobby Johnson expects this year’s line to be “just as good if not better than last year’s offensive line” Miami’s offensive line, on the other hand, is experienced if unspectacular. I don’t think Miami really has a big edge here — Vandy’s group seems talented, and if Vanderbilt really shows any improvement at QB or RB, the running game and passing game shouldn’t suffer with this athletic offensive line group.

What’s the bottom line? I think that the bulk of Miami’s percieved advantages are minimal. The places where I am concerned are on special teams and at quarterback. If Chris Nickson puts together a mediocre performance, that really won’t be a problem. But he has the potential to be great in one game and horrible in another — in the latter case, the risk that QB play could cost the team the game is a real one.

But what time is better for some hope than the first game of the season? Let’s give Chris, along with Brett Upson, Bryant Hanfeldt and company, the chance to show some improvement. I’ll stick with the sentiment I put out there in my season preview, and predict Vanderbilt to win this game despite feeling the hate from Vegas.

(1) It is generally possible to bet the money line on the winner/loser of a game in addition to the spread. I have read data before that gave the average odds implied by the moneyline betting for each half-point of point spread between 0 and about 20.

(2) The 20% chance of winning any of those four games is based on multiple uncertainties, including the chance that one of them will be last year’s South Carolina, and also including the chance that we have to beat an excellent team. Remember we’re not talking about midseason top-10 teams, we’re talking about pre-season teams, some of whom are top 10 and others of whom are not. 20% may well be an overstatement, maybe I’m wrong about the spreads and it’s really more like 10%. I think my memory of that chart is pretty good, even though I can’t remember where I read it. But if you look at the past several years, I think they bear out results far more generous than 5%, 2%, 12%, and 2%. Last year SC, before that UGA, before that UT. All on the road. So for the last three years we’ve been winning our 4-5 toughest games of each season at about a 20-25% rate. You can note that UT and SC were “flops”, but the same may be true of one or more of this year’s Group C contests, we just don’t know yet.

(3) When you put up a 2% number for @UGA and UF, I’m not sure you really believe that. If I was willing to bet $1 that VU would win BOTH of those games, would you really give me 2500 to 1 odds? Or do you think Vanderbilt only pulls off a win of that magnitude once every 25 years or so? I think that you should re-evaluate such an extreme number. What kind of team would you give Vanderbilt a 98% chance of beating? I think 2% would correspond to something like a 30 point spread, but that’s just based on extrapolating the numbers I remember more clearly (odds on a 7/10/14 pt underdog winning).

(4) I guess you are now predicting 4-8 as the most likely outcome for the season?

Editor’s note: Jake emailed these to me, but as you see I’ve now got him set up to post under his name. I wanted to get these up here so I can reply before the football season starts. - PhilipVU94

The only coup that can remotely compare with New England foisting Suzyn Waldman off on New York Yankees fans would have to be the University of Tennessee leaving Paul Finebaum to be the state of Alabama’s problem.   Discuss.

I just got home from the casinos, was reminded by the radio that Spain-USA is going on right now.   So I got the bright idea of listening to it on Cadena SER while watching on TV.   Astonishgly, the Webcast is not lagged more than about 10 seconds behind NBC’s video.   Perusing the Spanish media, it’s clear that as much as the Olympic men’s basketball final may matter in the US, this game really matters to Spanish sports fans.   With the rush they’ve been on, between Euro 2008, Nadal winning Wimbledon and Olympic gold, and some guy whose name I forget winning the Tour de France, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it’s 73-77 with 4:40 in the 3rd.

It’s surreal hearing the names of NBA stars rolling off the tongue of SER’s announcer — and realizing that he’s so animated because Spain still really has a chance.   75-79 now.   This is made to order for me: The US should still win, but the game’s close enough that it’s good for the profile of international basketball.
I had some other Olympics observations that I never got around to making.   I enjoyed the end of the Brasil-USA women’s soccer final — really a great example of how some, not all!!!, but some 1-0 soccer games can be tremendously dramatic.   Brasil absolutely deserved to equalize.   Tears their players shed profusely, and I’m sure it had as much to do with knowing that all they needed to do was finish as with being branded the geração de prata, the silver generation, because this is the third consecutive major championship where they’ve finished second.   (The US media was more concerned about revenge for that 4-0 pasting last year in China, but that team went on to lose the final to Germany.)

76-86: the US is pulling away just slightly, but it still could be a decent 4th quarter.Continuing with soccer — does Argentina losing in hoops to the US and winning the men’s soccer tournament (after destroying Brasil, sob, and getting Dunga fired, hooray) mean that they can go back to being a soccer country?   ESPN Radio, do you grant them that permission?   Maybe volleyball is bigger than soccer in Brasil now.

Speaking of that silly ESPN guy, I see that the NYT did a nice piece on Chinese fans’ suffering with their national soccer team.  I don’t know what ratings China’s games in the 2002 World Cup did — they must have been spectacular, especially since the tournament was in Asia so the time difference was negligible — but I promise you, if China ever gets an international soccer figure on a par with 姚明, let alone actually starts challenging for World Cups, even the most blindered nationalist in Bristol, Connecticut, won’t be trying to foist off the impression that hoops is a bigger deal there.

84-91.   Good for Spain for hanging in there.  86-91.   Wow, 89-91.   Tiempo muerto de los estadounidenses, time out US.   Los chinos tambien son espanoles, the Chinese are Spaniards too.  I’ll bet.   Just like the neutral crowd starts pulling for the 13 seed at the NCAAs once they know it’s worth the emotional investment.
Finally, another soccer note: apparently I totally forgot about the beginning of the semifinalish round of World Cup qualifying, but the US won 0-1 in Guatemala.   Nice win.   No road games in Central America are ever easy, I don’t care what the population of the home nation.   I’ll have more to say about the WC 2010 qualifying campaign when I get bored with the ethical cesspool glorious rite of autumn that is SEC football.

EDIT: Well, this comment merits an update.   Están jodidos los espanoles, the Spaniards are f***ed.   It’s a little less strong in Spanish but still pretty remarkable to hear on a broadcast.   Now Rick Rubio is melting down and getting Ts, and the US will hang on for the gold.   Still, all in all, a great milestone for basketball FIBA-style. This time, we were really trying, and still had to play well to win.

Some well-deserved praise for DJ Moore.   TOSU’s Malcolm Jenkins is #1 if you’re scoring at home.   Like I said before, I don’t know why lots of VU fans don’t appear to like CFN.   AFAICT they’ve always been real into knowing about all I-A programs, not just the name ones, and giving us our due.

But if you don’t pick VU to go 8-4 every year, I guess you’re just anti-Vanderbilt….

(EDIT: Oh, hello, what’s this?   “He’ll also be one of the Big Ten’s premier tackling corners.”   Maybe that’s why VU fans hate CFN: lack of proofreading.   I’m pretty sure they know Vanderbilt isn’t in the Big Ten, though.  We haven’t gone to six bowls in the last ten years like we would have in the BT.)

As promised, I’m finally getting around to processing Jake’s rebuttal to my grim preseason predictions.

First off, I have a question for Jake (or others inclined toward the stats-geek side of college football).   Jake makes these statements:

Vanderbilt is likely to be *on average* a touchdown underdog or so in these games, and should have about a 30% chance to win the typical game from this group.

and,

Vanderbilt will be a heavy underdog in each of these games, between 10 and 20 points.  This gives Vanderbilt about a 20% chance to win each of these….

But I can’t tell whether he has some empirically-based data (maybe a handy table somewhere) that relates pointspread to probability of winning.   Ken Pomeroy does something like this for hoops, although I never could find the “master” table to make this connection.   Anyway, it would help in my response to know if these are estimates of both pointspread and probability or just estimates of pointspread with corresponding probabilities.

At any rate, Jake and I aren’t really that far apart, and he certainly makes some important points.    I think his essential probabilistic approach is a good one, and it leads to a key insight that you don’t get by just marking “W”, “L”, or “tossup” down for each game like Athlon and some other preview mags do it.    The point is, if your team is a 4:1 dog (20%) in five games, then they’re roughly a 2:1 favorite (67%) to win at least one of those games.   Just marking five L’s obscures that fact.
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I’m still planning to follow up on Jake’s post, but meanwhile, here are some predictions you’re not going to like for the SEC Power Poll:
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Yesterday I happened to catch the beginning of the ESPN Radio program “Game Day”.   The host, named Jeff something or other, was drawing on the Olympic basketball and particularly on the viewership of the China-US game to assert that hoops is catching up to soccer as the world’s favorite sport.   Leaving aside that brash and mistaken analysis — which he later walked back to say basketball was merely “closing the gap” — he picked a striking example to make his point.   Along with China and Eastern Europe, he declared that basketball was now bigger than soccer in Argentina!
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Vanderbilt Commodores Preview 2008

People on VandySports don’t appear to like CFN, but I’m not sure why.   They seem better informed than most of these college football sites that wouldn’t even bother to learn anything about teams beyond the Top 25.   For example, I’m not sure I agree with their list of our top ten players:

1. CB D.J. Moore, Jr.
2. DE Steven Stone, Jr.
3. SS Reshard Langford, Sr.
4. QB Mackenzi Adams, Jr.
5. QB Chris Nickson, Sr.
6. RB Jeff Jennings, Sr.
7. OT Thomas Welch, Jr.
8. DE Broderick Stewart, Jr.
9. CB Myron Lewis, Jr.
10. FS Ryan Hamilton, Jr.

but at least they know a bit about our team to even proffer such a list.

I still need to reply to Jake’s piece.   Taking a few steps back, he has a point.   At present I’m oscillating between my most negative predictions and something more like what he says, where we should be 4-8 or so with potential for an upset or two.   More to follow….

Note: For some reason Jake’s account isn’t letting him post yet, so I’m posting this on his behalf.   Again, I’m delighted to have his contributions on here! - PhilipVU94

I will provide the counterpoint to Phillip’s football prediction that “2-10 is more likely than 4-8, and… 1-11 is more likely than 6-6”.  I think he’s wrong on both counts, and I’ll make my case without appealing to any of the sources of bias that Philip just critiqued.  I think that the over/under for Vanderbilt’s win total next year should be about 4 or 4.5.  And I even agree with Philip that many VU football sources have some subconscious bias, that Vanderbilt is less talented in 2008 than they were in 2007, that we will be underdogs in every SEC game, and that both Miami and Duke have a reasonable chance to pull an upset against us.

So how do I get to 4 wins?  First of all, I think he’s overstating how much Vanderbilt has lost since last season, on a points per game basis.  I’m judging this by his comment that we “might well be an underdog to Miami” – this would imply about 7 points of Vanderbilt regression since last season, based on last year’s point spread of about 12 and a 5 point adjustment for the home field advantage.  This would be a huge regression for a team that was already very weak on offense last year, and should not substantially regress on defense this year.  Is VU really going to score only 14 points per game – 6 points less than the worst team in the SEC in scoring offense last year?  The regression from last year is even bigger if you consider that last year’s point spread for that game was effected by an unlikely number of Vanderbilt injuries – the VU team that was “priced in” to those expectations was not the Vanderbilt team of last year’s preseason expectations.  I am not far from the expectations of one “pessimist” on the VandySports boards, who sees Vanderbilt as a likely 4 or 5 point favorite, although I might make the point spread more like 6 to 6.5.  Don’t forget that Miami lost a few starters of their own, and that Vanderbilt can expect a healthier team with better QB play than in the Miami game last season.

But from that point Phillip and I agree on the rest of the games – we’ll be underdogs to all SEC teams, to Wake Forest, we’ll be moderate favorites against Duke, and heavy favorites over Rice (Duke and Rice both being home games).

Phillip stops his analysis at this point and says “I really think 2-10 is more likely than 4-8, and I’m pretty certain 1-11 is more likely than 6-6.”  I think he will change his mind after reading the following.  I will split Vanderbilt’s games into three sections, and take a look at how many wins Vanderbilt is likely to get in each section.

Group A:

Rice

Duke

@Miami

These are games in which Vanderbilt will be favored.  The Rice game is heavily likely to go Vanderbilt’s way (~90%), and Vanderbilt has over a 50% chance to win each of the other two games.  Thus the most likely result is a 2-1 or 3-0 mark. 

Group B:

@ Ole Miss

@ Wake

@ Kentucky

South Carolina

@ Mississippi State

These are all games in which Vanderbilt will be an underdog, but not a prohibitive underdog.  Vanderbilt is likely to be *on average* a touchdown underdog or so in these games, and should have about a 30% chance to win the typical game from this group.  30% x 5 = 1.5 expected wins.  So it’s about equally likely that we would go 1-4 or 2-3 in these games.

Group C:

Florida

Tennessee

Auburn

@Georgia

Vanderbilt will be a heavy underdog in each of these games, between 10 and 20 points.  This gives Vanderbilt about a 20% chance to win each of these, implying that it’s likely that Vanderbilt will go 1-3 in this category.  This is similar to each of the last several years, in which Vanderbilt won one game (@SC, @UGA, @UT) seemingly against all odds.  Vanderbilt isn’t charmed, it’s not a “giant killer”, it just plays several games a year against teams that are heavy favorites over the Dores, and probability dictates an occasional upset.

So with 2 wins in group A, 1 or 2 wins in group B, and 1 win in group C, Vanderbilt seems poised for a 4 or 5 win season.  

What would a 2 win season look like?  Lets assume that if Vanderbilt wins an SEC game, it will win more than 2 games overall.  What are the odds of Vanderbilt losing all 8 SEC games?  Well, if you give them a 25% chance of winning each game on average, which would be consistent with a 10 point spread, then Vanderbilt’s chances of going winless in the SEC are about 10%.  That sounds about right to me. 

Is a 1-10 scenario more likely than 6-6?  Well, if we beat Rice, have a 50% chance against Duke and Miami, and only a 20% chance in each remaining game, Vanderbilt’s chances of going 1-10 are about 3.35%.  To go 6-6, Vandy would probably need to win one game from group C (~60% probability), three games from group A (~35% probability), and two games from group B (~50% probability).  That’s a 10.5% chance to win 6 or more games – three times as likely as 1-10!

While the Vanderbilt Optimists are overconfident that losing starters won’t hurt Vanderbilt that much and that the likes of Duke and Miami won’t beat us, Philip is in a way making the same mistake by seemingly ignoring the extremely high probability that Vanderbilt will win an SEC game in which it is an underdog.  It is intuitively appealing to make season W-L predictions on a game by game basis, but when a team (like Vanderbilt) is an underdog about 3 times as often as it is a favorite, it is more likely to pull an upset in a given year than to be upset.  Luck is an equalizer that, while cursed by Vanderbilt fans who think the bounces never go our way, is perversely the team’s only realistic chance at going bowling.  Fortune favors the underdog. 

So if you put a gun to my head and make me pick a win total for Vandy next year, I’d say that Vanderbilt will be the favorite in three games, it will probably pull off an upset one more time than it gets upset, and that’s how it will get to a 4-8 result.  

But here’s hoping that the breaks go our way – that we evade the injury bug, make the unlikely fieldgoal, benefit from the blown call, and that just 55% of the countless unpredictable elements of the game of football break towards Vanderbilt.  Here’s hoping that the 10% chance of 6 wins finally becomes a reality this year, because the real risk of emotional pain for a Vanderbilt fan is not in having hope during just one more disappointing season, the risk is in giving up at precisely the wrong time.