Advanced Stats Week 2022: The Binion Index and GT’s Season Outlook

Last year, we debuted The Binion Index here at From the Rumble Seat. This power rating for FBS college football teams evolved from my rudimentary efforts to chart plays during Georgia Tech football games into a predictive metric that has solid predictive power.

Over the offseason, I’ve spent time looking at how TBI performed for each team from a win-loss and absolute error perspective. I expanded the range of metrics I was considering for evaluating teams, went through some variable selection algorithms, found an error in how I was incorporating schedule strength, and have deployed some changes that I am hopeful will make TBI even more useful for the upcoming season.

For the preseason edition, each team’s rating takes into account:

• play by play data from the past three seasons + schedule strength
• team talent
• returning production

Here’s where things stand right now:

Who jumps out at you the most in these ratings?

As the season kicks off, we will begin incorporating play by play data and schedule from the current season and gradually phase out the preseason predictions. For now, we can use our preseason ratings to estimate win probabilities for every game this season. We can see what TBI has to say about GT’s schedule heading into the season.

In case you want to feel even worse about these scheduling decisions, our friends over at Split Zone duo concluded a section about GT’s schedule on last week’s podcast with the admonition, “Don’t be Georgia Tech.”

From a preseason perspective, the schedule starts bad and ends bad. Of course, team quality won’t be exactly as we project, neither for GT nor our opponents. But this is the baseline expectation we should carry into the opening of the season. None of this meant to cause people to check out on the season or abandon their support for the program. Support the players, give to the AA, watch the games, look for glimpses of improvement, cheer when it goes well. For me, I’d rather know what I’m facing and what the likely (not guaranteed!) outcome heading to the fall is rather than falsely raise my expectations. I will watch every minute of every game, but I’d rather accept that 3 wins is the most likely outcome than be extremely frustrated when I bank on 6 and the team almost definitely falls short of that.

That’s what TBI sees. What about you?