14' Legacy Class vs Utah State

#151
#151
daj2576 said:
Actually you can look at it another way: talent matters immensely. A school's location to talent also matters immensely. Florida is within arms reach of some of the nation's best talent. As an extension of that truism, Florida, as a general rule, fields some of the most talented teams in the country.

Going in to almost every game of the last 20 years, you would be hard pressed to find a Florida team that didn't out-recruit almost every opponent, even Tennessee. The more talented team wins about 70% of the games played against lessor talented teams. If over the past 20 years the UT v. UF record is 16-4, and UF has the most talented team in every match-up (both assertions I would generally agree with) that is about as close to the average performance as one could define (Florida has won 80% of those games).

Beyond that, people don't understand randomness. Even if the outcome was definable as 50/50 (say that both teams had the same talent and the game was played at a neutral location), it is unlikely that the results would actually be 50/50. That is randomness. Flip a coin 100 times, and there is something like a 30% chance that you would get a run of heads or tails that is 10 or more in a row. That doesn't mean that heads is more likely than tails, it is always 50/50, it just means that randomness has an impact. Contrary to popular myth, there is no curse or mental block, only the reality that the more talented team wins 70% of the games played.

Bottom line UT has been less talented than Florida (generally) over the past 20 years and almost exclusively over the past ten. The on the field results are almost perfectly in line with the 70/30 distribution of wins and losses that can be ascribed to talent, and any minor deviation from that rule can be defined by randomness.
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Appreciate the reasoned, statistical rationale you provide to explain the incredibly lopsided results from the series these last 20 years. I've nearly gone bloody mad expecting each year to be the year that the horror ends, only to see the streak extended again and again and again .......
 
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#152
#152
KBVol said:
Appreciate the reasoned, statistical rationale you provide to explain the incredibly lopsided results from the series these last 20 years. I've nearly gone bloody mad expecting each year to be the year that the horror ends, only to see the streak extended again and again and again .......
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Well for full disclosure, I am married to a gator so I have to come up with some way to rationalize what I have witnessed over the past decade.

Another interesting note regarding the 70/30 distribution. Consider UT's all time record against Vanderbilt: 73-30-5. That means that UT has a winning percentage of 67.6% (very close to 70%). It is also inarguable that for vast stretches of our combined history, that UT has had the more talented roster and as a result has won about the number of games that talent would suggest. For other teams that UT has consistently out-recruited, see Kentucky (69.7%), Or Ole Miss (68.8%), or SCAR (71.8%), or Arkansas (76.4%).

Look at Bama: The series favors Bama 51-37-8. That means that Bama only wins about 53% of the time against UT. Those numbers suggest that Bama doesn't consistently hold a large recruiting advantage over UT, or if they do, they drastically under-perform against our Vols. Either way should make a Vol fan feel better about the rivalry.
 
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#155
#155
sjt18 said:
Daj, respect your research but Spurrier also outcoached Fulmer on a consistent basis in the 90's.
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That might be true, and Spurrier has consistently been a coach with a high over performance. I don't think it matters though, as he tended to (especially later in his career at UF) also have more talented rosters.
 
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