Commissioner’s Notes

Intro

We’re through week 5, into the heart of the season. For the most part, teams are into the core of conference play and we’re getting fewer FCS or G6/P4 buy games, so we expect to see points become much lower but probably slightly more predictable.

In our game, we’ve now completed one full turn of the PVP matchups, so we’ll look into those in a little more detail. If the season ended today, the playoff matches (starting week 11) would be:

• Wildcard Round:
  • #2 Dylan v #6 Jacob
  • #4 Dan v #5 Bruce
• Round 1:
  • #1 Zach v Dan/Bruce winner
  • #3 (pod winner) Bob v Dylan/Jacob winner

There’s still a lot to go so things will almost certainly change, since right now tiebreakers dominate everything.

Choke Job of the Week

I didn’t watch a ton of games outside of Tennessee this week, so I didn’t see anything crazy. I will have to go with Florida mainly because I picked them, and that -28 hurt when I only missed 1st on the week by 30 points. I think we can all agree it’s a good day when Florida gets blown out. With the chain of Ole Miss getting overrated for beating LSU and Florida getting overrated for beating Ole Miss, I fully expect to see Mizzou as the consensus #1 when this week’s polls come out.

Week 6 Preview

I’ll jump ahead to the week 6 preview before getting into the PVP discussion. Next week’s matchups are:

• Bob v Zach
• Bruce v Jacob
• Dan v Dylan

Games of the week

• Tuesday: for the first week of the season we’ve got a Tuesday matchup, but not MACtion so it doesn’t really count. Only one option, but it’s not great: Southern Miss @ Troy.
• Wednesday: both of these are close; by FPI it’s a slight edge to Jacksonville State (#2 C-USA) at Kennesaw State (#3) but the other matchup is #4 (NMSU) vs #5 (FIU). Both games feature a 1-0 in conference team against one that hasn’t played a conference game, so both winners will be in a much better position for trying to make the CCG than the losers.
• Thursday: UTSA-South Florida. Based on FPI, both teams, along with North Texas, are projected in a dead heat for #2 with 8.2-8.5 wins each.
• Friday: FSU @ Louisville. Coming off a thrashing of Virginia, does Norvell actually still want his job? Maybe!
• Saturday Noon: probably Tulane @ Army, as it’s the closest matchup; the opening spread for Texas A&M at Missouri only has Mizzou as 3-point favorites but I find that really hard to justify with Texas A&M’s wins being Missouri State, Arizona State, and Arkansas (all home) and their losses being double-digits at home to Kentucky and a beatdown at LSU.
• Saturday Afternoon: Houston at K-State; honorable mention to the Red River Rivalry since crazy stuff often happens in that one, despite Texas being a pretty comfortable favorite.
• Saturday Primetime: Georgia at Alabama. Much as it sickens me, this is going to be the marquee matchup pretty much any time it’s played.
• Saturday Late: all these are terrible, so I’ll go full sicko and pick Hawaii at Arizona State because it’s the latest. If you’re watching any of these, you don’t care about healthy sleeping habits.

PVP

At the end of 1 round of player matchups, Dylan and I are in the lead at 4-1 with the first tiebreaker (head-to-head) going to me. The entire White pod is tied at 2-3, and Jacob unluckily follows at 1-4.

Luck

The trend through the first 3 weeks has continued, with Bob and Jacob being the only players with net negative luck, but Jacob’s bad luck has slightly washed out and Bob’s has gotten worse.

Bob currently has the highest expected wins, and yet is only 2-3. There is no arrangement of PVP scheduling that would have him winning fewer than 2 weeks (by definition, since he won the overall twice). I must stress that the PVP order was generated entirely randomly. If I had the skills to plan something that devious, I would have used them to simply make myself better.

Wrong opponent, wrong time

This is, basically, a different version of the luck graph but I wanted to change the measurement of luck. The graph below measures the average scores of opponents in the week you played them vs their season average. As you might expect, Jacob and Bob are the worst in this regard, with their opponents scoring 40.1 and 36.3 points more in the weeks they play them than overall.

Side note – despite Jacob having the worst luck and me having the best luck by this metric, his only win and my only loss are in our matchup, so it could have been even worse (for him, or better for me).

Noteworthy Matchups

There have only been a few truly close matchups, but they’re spread out. The closest by far was Dylan over Bob in Week 3, by 8 points. At that point there were still some really big blowouts so it’s a near certainty that somewhere, in some game, a team scored (or failed to score) a garbage-time touchdown and field goal in a 50-point blowout that cost Bob the win (which isn’t even the “luck” I refer to in the section above, so Bob is possibly cursed). But before you feel too sorry for Bob, he’s also on the winning end of the biggest blowout yet, a 347-135 win over Bruce this week.

In total PVP matchups, Dylan and I are roughly equal at +389 and +351, respectively, with Bob and Dan still positive but lower at +74 and +21, and Jacob and Bruce net negative at -408 and -427. Those numbers might seem a lot bigger than they are, but we’re really not getting a lot of good week vs good week matchups; most everybody is winning big and losing big, with the average margin of victory at 94 points.

Close calls

Finally, I want to look at some close calls. There have been 4 instances where a PVP matchup loser could have flipped a single game and turned that week’s loss into a win. You can see those 4 in the table below. Obviously hindsight is 20/20 and I didn’t look at the winners to see if they could have flipped games to be uncatchable, but these 4 sting.