For those who don't follow, Kelley Ford created KFord Power Rankings. I think I found him on r/cfbanalytics or in the moon crew discord a few years ago (don't recall). I'm not as familiar with his methodology as I am with Bill C/SP+, so I need to do a bit of research and circle back, but it's the offseason, and I don't feel like actually working, so I decided to share.
Preseason Projections
https://t.co/SNh96Bdnu0 pic.twitter.com/iuUSBlkaEU— Kelley Ford (@KFordRatings) May 8, 2023
It's a pretty sobering prediction. By Ford's metrics:
- We should expect 4.96 wins (he projected 5.2 last year)
- There's only two games we have >50% chance of winning (though there are two other games that we have a 49% and 50% chance, respectively, of winning
- 66% chance we finish in the 4-6 win range
- ~37% chance of bowl eligibility (aka 6+ wins)
On the bright side, Ford does expect us to improve from last year, when we finished as the 95th best team, to the 65th best team.
On Strength of Schedule
By Ford's metrics, the average top 25 team has a 6.7% of going undefeated against our schedule:
This is a common misconception with the graphic! I'm actually not telling VT that they have a chance. I'm saying the average Top 25 team (which VT is not) would have a chance against VT's schedule https://t.co/VvoGq6Uz2R— Kelley Ford (@KFordRatings) May 10, 2023
Comments
I'd take 6 wins right now....hoping for 8 though
Well, Ford things there's a 5% chance of that happening lol
Yeah, well, Ford also said we'd get to 5 wins last year, so I'll take his projections with a grain of salt
Well if it wasn't for our coaches getting stuck in an elevator during the first game we would have
We pretty easily could have won 5 last season, so analytically I don't think it was far off.
We had two back-to-back monstrous collapses against NC State and GT that easily could have been wins. We could have potentially beaten UVA if we played that game (no issue that we didn't), and ODU replayed a bunch of times we probably win most of that one as well. Even if you flip the Liberty game to a loss, for the sake of staying consistent here, it's still not difficult to find five wins in there.
Results can differ from expected results for a lot of reasons, but I don't think 5 wins against last year's schedule was a bad projection, even with the benefit of hindsight knowing how it actually happened.
Was UVA factored in as one of his 5 wins?
Yes
Seeing him predicting us to win 5 games with that disclaimer is..... oof
There's very little reason for any advanced metric to have our offense predicting strongly for the upcoming season. However, in anecdotal terms there are reasons to be hopeful that new additions can make a material difference and improve the offense. How much improvement, if any at all, will go a long way in whether or not we can overperform analytic projections this season.
It's a good call out. Ford's rankings consider returning production from transfers, but Drones doesn't have any returning production to bring to the table since he didn't play much last year.
38% @ home against Syracuse seems a little low. I know we lost to them recently at home but that seemed like a fluke win on their part.
Purdue won their division last year and we are getting a 40% chance against them.
Purdue is weird. Lost a great coach, landed one of the best QBs off the transfer market, who happened to be a career back up. Tough to predict.
So maybe not as difficult of a schedule as I originally thought. I'm still scared of most of the opponents, even the ones that in a typical VT year we would beat. 5 is reasonable, I thought last year we had a chance at 8 going into the year because of the schedule, this year I'm not as positive even though I think we'll improve.
*puts on O&M glasses*
So if we get back to being a top-25 team, we have a fantastic shot at making the playoffs, at least some years depending on SoS. Very nice.
FTFY
Haha we'd have a 6% chance of going undefeated, but with the new 12-team playoff system I think teams that lose one or even two games will get in so I'm thinking it'd be a minimum ~20% total.
12 team play off starts in 2024, not this season. So if VT were an 'average top 25 team' in 2023, we can assume they'd still have a roughly 6% chance of making the playoff.
As an aside, I was going to leave a comment about how an ACC team with 2 regular season losses will never make the expanded playoff, and I was going through a bunch of hypothetical playoff brackets for the past 8 years, but then I realized... it's not that the CFP Committee (necessarily) disrespects 2-loss ACC teams... rather, the ACC has not had two teams finish the regular season with 2 or less losses since 2017 (Clemson and Miami, intentionally excluding ND). The ACC doesn't just need our 'brand name' schools to get better, we need... anyone... to get better.
So what you're saying is...we should ACCept that we just suck as a conference?
6% > 0%
^LOL first thing I thought of when I saw your comment
Locker room material, Hokies let's go!
6 acc schools in top 10 weakest schedules, 10 acc schools in top 20, 12 in top 30. I see a pattern here,one that is telling.The acc needs an injection of life soon.
This is what fuels the self-fulfilling prophecy. Conference pre-season rankings suck, so any loss is devastating. But in the SEC nearly every team gets the benefit of high early expectations. They lose 3-4 games, but are still ranked in the top 25 because they are deemed quality losses. Wash, rinse, repeat. Only thing we can do is hope the ACC wins non-conference games, but even that and a decent bowl record is not enough with the media pushing the narrative.
Completely disagree. There's no self fulfilling prophecy or media collusion to bump the SEC. The SEC is far and away the most dominant conference. They don't lose OOC games at the same rate the ACC (or other conferences) does. They often beat top teams from other conferences, and they also (almost) always have at least two teams with 10+ wins.
I think the SEC is best but they are also over rated. The top couple teams are almost always better than most other teams, but often the middle teams are overrated. If you take out the SEC vs ACC their OOC record looks a lot worse. They really do beat up on the ACC Those instate games really don't help with FSU being down, GT being GT and UofL being so-so. The Big Ten keeps pace most year for OOC games. They might not be quite as good but they do well most years.
At this point you are correct. 15-20 years ago the self fulfilling prophecy began and actual dominance now is the result
Yes but even then it was still close during the 2000's and early 2010's. SEC was better at the top but ACC and Big 12 often rivaled and sometimes were better top to bottom. Last time the SEC clearly wasn't the best conference top to bottom was 2016 when it was the ACC. I was foolish enough to believe that was the start of a trend rather than one lucky year
Okay, you don't pay attention then. Don't remember last year when Kentucky was ranked in the top 15 for half the season with zero justification. Arkansas cracked the top 10 early, A&M was still ranked after losing to App.
The previous year there were similar examples as well, most notably Kentucky being ranked in the top 15 the entire year when their only notable win was Florida (who ended up finishing 6-6).
ESPN made a huge bet on the SEC and they are bound to them financially whether you care to admit it or not. They get all the money and the promotion in the world, of course they're going to end up the dominant conference. Money + promotion = basically getting whatever recruits you want. Saying they get all of that because they're dominant is putting the cart before the horse.
Their relationship is self fulfilling because TV networks are after big draws, but you can create bigger draws through promotion. They bet on them so they're going to promote them more and so on until it gets reinforced.
Same thing happens in basketball; trash the acc but then look at the all the stats you want and win metrics and acc still owns them
I'll start here, and I mostly agree/recognize this. It's definitely a chicken/egg vicious (or virtuous, depending on your PoV) circle. The SEC had and has always had more fan engagement and fanatical behavior than other conferences. SEC coaches and boosters have always been more cut throat and more willing to cut corners. Schools capitalized on all of that to create a winning culture.
My disagreement is really with the comment I initially responded to:
This is something that I think the CFP Committee (which is far from perfect) actually does well. Unlike the AP poll, which was traditionally anchored in pre-season speculation, I do think the CFP Committee ranks teams from scratch every week, instead of just bumping a team up/down 1-5 spots depending on how good/bad their previous result was.
For what it's worth, I actually think the B10 does this way better than the SEC. They build their schedules so as many teams as possible remain undefeated (or close to it) through the beginning of the year. The good teams never play each other in the first half of the season. THAT is how you artificially boost your school's ranking.
Looking at your examples, Kentucky, A&M, Arkansas, and App weren't even ranked in the first 2022 CFP Poll.
This is the nature (and, in my opinion, which many will disagree with, the beauty) of the sport. Because there is such a small sample size of games, there's so much speculation on how good teams actually are. It's always been this way.
The B1G is a much bigger perpetrator of setting up their schedule to create overrated matchups late in the season. They almost always have the big dogs playing in late October or November.
One of the most recent examples of this was the egregiously overrated Penn State vs Iowa matchup. Top 4 matchup 4th Penn State vs 3rd Iowa. This game occurred on 10/9/2021. Iowa would go on to barely finish in the top 25 (23rd) and Penn State would finish unranked at 7-6.
One of the most fraudulently manufactured "big games" I've ever seen.
I'd be somewhat satisfied if we win 4.96 games in 2023.
But I'm not gonna lie, I'd be REALLY happy if we could squeeze out that extra 0.04 wins and get to an even 5.
our schedule is soft. But it's not the softest, so there's that.
So basically 7 wins guaranteed
My take home, lose to ODU again and it is going to be a looooooong, long season.
Lose to ODU again and it's an uphill battle for me to believe in Pry's concept ever coming good in Blacksburg
Facts
Lose to ODU again and I'm almost fine if Whit fired him on the field after the game, and I'm a big believer in pry and generally want to give him 3-4 years to show proof of concept....but 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah pretty much. I've been on record saying we should reserve judgment til the '24 class signs. But lose to ODU at home and woof
I'll be disappointed and embarrassed along with the rest of us.
But I also think you guys should brace yourselves, because there is a Very Much Not Zero chance that we're going to lose to ODU in 2023.
Ford believes there is very much a 14% chance we lose to ODU
This is the kind of sarcasm that I deserve for being too lazy to look up the projection for the ODU game in a thread specifically discussing game-by-game projections.
This just makes me wonder how good things could have been right now with back to back easy schedules..
As Cameron Grimes says. TO THE MOON!
I dunno, kinda feels like 15-0 this season.
Find someone that looks at you the way TheFifthFuller looks at a Hokies football schedule.
This is the post I came here to read folks!
That's the hard hitting analysis I miss from FoeRensics
Also what does it say about the acc that 12 of the 25 easiest schedules are team in the ACC? The top 3 easiest are all ACC teams and 6 of the top 10 are ACC. The ACC is easily the most laughable "P5" league
Always has been
If you started watching football in 2013 then sure
The ACC could have had its BCS bid taken away in 2008 time frame, FSU forced the expansion because of how bad the conference was. FSU had an easier cake walk in the ACC in the 90s than Clemson foes now.
How and why? The conference had a BCS worthy team each year except maybe 08, and we still whipped #12 Cincinnati.
Can't speak to the 90's very well but weren't Georgia Tech and UVA pretty good programs back then
After the first year and cuse was ranked bad the BCS create a Big East rule that a conference champ had to average top 12 for 4 years straight, if they didn't the BCS could kick them out
2003 FSU 7th
2004 VT 8th
2005 FSU 22nd
2006 Wake 14th
2007 VT 3rd
2008 VT 17th
So 2003-2006 and 2005-2008 the ACC failed to average 12th or better for the BCS representation. The BE cried that expansion hurt them but never thought that WVU and UofL would do so well that it didn't matter so the rule was dropped because of expansion, however the intend to be competitive was just lost on the ACC.
Here's his ACC Rankings:
As an aside, Ford's numbers put the B12 as the deepest conference, with all 14 teams inside the top half of FBS.