This is the second year I'll be attending Sloan, and the first year my co-author will be there. We're looking forward to the talks, the hallway chatter, and watching Mark Cuban debate how much he wants to say versus how much he doesn't want to make yet another donation to David Stern.
For those of you who have never visited the blog before: welcome. We're a pair of Silicon Valley software engineers who moonlight as college football stats analysts, and occasionally we're not completely wrong. I'm Justin, the founder of the blog and curator of the Tempo-Free Gridiron (TFG) ranking and prediction system. A year into the blog, I managed to rope Eddie, a co-worker and Arkansas Razorback fanatic, into creating his own competing system; the result was the Regression-Based Analysis (RBA) algorithm.
To get a feel for what we do here, we invite you to take a look at some of the posts describing tempo-free statistics in general (courtesy of Ken Pomeroy), the motivation behind this particular blog, and a peek under the hood of the TFG system (and a recent update). We also have info about the RBA model (along with an update and yet another update).
We'd particularly like to direct your attention to our most recent post, Deep Thoughts for Dorks, an examination of how the stats community as a whole approaches team evaluation and rankings in college football. It was inspired in part by "Sports for Dorks", a collection of essays and research compiled by Mike Leach, current Washington State head coach, former Texas Tech head coach, and former TFG "Ask an Expert" expert.
Given that it's the college football offseason, there's not too much happening on an ongoing basis right now, and it'll be kind of quiet until August. However we invite you to look at some of the "best of" we've produced, as other posts of interest, including
- the current rankings for TFG and RBA;
- our "Ask an Expert" feature, where readers get to ask the questions; and
- our trivia posts, particularly:
- a countdown of the best BCS champions from 2003 - 2010;
- an examination of the fact that not all undefeated non-BCS teams are created equal;
- a definition of an examination of the state of parity in college football; and
- some musings on what's up with the ACC.
During the regular season you can expect to find weekly posts showcasing
- top 25 and full rankings for TFG and RBA;
- weekly projections of final conference standings;
- analysis and predictions for all remaining undefeated FBS teams;
- in-depth analysis and predictions for four games of the week, highlighting our "Games You Gotta See" (GUGS) game quality rating metric;
- a recap of the past week, focusing specifically on the games of the week;
- bowl previews for each and every bowl game (including the lesser-known ones); and
- [new for 2012 - 2013] live in-game win probabilities, posted to the blog and our Twitter feed.
This is all on top of predictions for each and every game between two FBS teams.
If you have any questions or feedback for us, don't hesitate to email us at our tempo-free-gridiron.com addresses (justin@ or eddie@), leave a comment here, or hit us up on Twitter.
Enjoy the conference, and we hope to see you there.
