East Tennessee high school football projections, week two

Welcome back! Last week was wild, and the second-worst week I’ve had with projections since I started last year. The combined metric system went just 22-11 (.667), which is just above the all-time low of 17-10 in Week 2 of last year. You’ll be stunned to hear that the least predictable weeks of football are almost always the ones earliest in the year.

Last week brought out two upsets that rank as two of the three biggest of the last year: Chuckey-Doak over Pigeon Forge (92.3% chance of a Pigeon Forge win) and Tennessee over Central (91.8%). Unsurprisingly, both dropped massively in season-long projections. Pigeon Forge went from an expected 5.35 win season to 2.89 because of their massive drop in power ratings; Central went from the clear 5A-2 favorite at 7.29 wins and 4.95 region wins to 5.22 and 4.14. Your sheet that you can access at any time has running win probabilities available now:

Some notes from these new season-long projections:

• Expect at least two, and most likely three undefeated teams in the area. Greeneville is an overwhelming 88% favorite to go 10-0, which makes sense as they defeated the best team on their schedule by 40 points and may escape the regular season without playing a team they’re less than 20 point favorites over. Long behind them are four teams with good shots at 10-0: Greenback (51.4%), Anderson County (50.4%), Farragut (48.7%), and Maryville (34.5%). Greenback has a two-week home battle with Grace Christian and Coalfield that will determine their undefeated run. Anderson County faces a quietly-maybe-decent William Blount team this weekend. Farragut just beat the best team on their schedule and is a win at Oak Ridge away from really getting serious. Maryville has to beat Oakland to do it, but it wouldn’t be a stunner.
• There’s a new 5A-2 favorite. Central was handily the favorite heading in, but the system now likes South-Doyle to win the region for the first time since 2014. Central still projects as the second-best team in the region, but six teams are projected at 2-4 or better and no team has a season-long expected record above 7-3.
• The Fulton/Oak Ridge battle in 5A-3 is too close to call. Okay, you can call it, but barely: Fulton’s win projection is 0.06 wins more than Oak Ridge, and they are expected to win 0.03 more region games than the Wildcats. But, again, it’s going to come down to the final game of the season.

Anyway, here’s this week’s projections, which you can find in the sheet attached above or in a separate HTML file below. As a reminder, all projected scores are rounded to the nearest whole number.

THURSDAY

• Fulton 34, Central 8

FRIDAY

• Oakland 30, Maryville 24
• Knoxville Catholic 34, Baylor 22
• Oak Ridge 31, Dobyns-Bennett 22
• Cleveland 26, Bearden 22
• Wayne (OH) 45, Austin-East 3
• Greeneville 51, Morristown West 4 (¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
• Hardin Valley 20, West 19
• Farragut 49, McMinn County 2
• Asheville (NC) 33, Webb 18
• Jefferson County 25, Morristown East 19
• York Institute 32, Coalfield 28
• Anderson County 42, William Blount 22
• Sevier County 25, Heritage 22
• Lenoir City 30, Loudon 28
• South-Doyle 36, Cherokee 21
• Campbell County 32, David Crockett 18
• Gatlinburg-Pittman 30, Oneida 26
• Cocke County 29, Carter 28
• Greenback 40, CAK 16
• Kingston 29, Oliver Springs 23
• Sweetwater 26, Rockwood 23
• Halls 33, Karns 19
• Grainger 30, Pigeon Forge 18
• Grace Christian 38, King’s Academy 9
• Powell 43, Cumberland County 2
• Midway 32, Monterey 15
• Harriman 43, Wartburg 17
• Union County 33, Cosby 11
• Oakdale 27, Jellico 26

SATURDAY

• Alcoa 31, Knox Central (KY) 21
• Clinton 24, Seymour 13

Notes on a few different games:

• I think I had Fulton-Central projected as about a two-score game last week. That’s a steep fall.
• The best game of the week is clearly Oakland-Maryville, a matchup of two of the three best teams in the state. Maryville was impressive in their 31-10 dispatching of defending 5A champion Knoxville Catholic, but Oakland was almost as impressive in a 46-7 beatdown of Independence. The only other games you’re going to get between two of the five-ish best teams in the state in the regular season is Lausanne vs. Whitehaven on September 7 or Brentwood Academy vs. Knoxville Catholic on September 21. This is the best of what Tennessee high school football can offer. Maryville moves to an 80% chance of 10-0 with a win, and that will probably rise with new power ratings.
• Overshadowed by this one is Baylor-Knoxville Catholic, which is merely a matchup of a top 20 team headed on the road to a top ten team. The odds are on the side of a bounce-back win for Catholic, but Baylor’s pretty tough and dispatched Notre Dame 35-14.
• Alcoa-Knox Central (KY) on Saturday is a good one. It’s at Corbin, who Alcoa played last year and which I remembered will bring up bad memories for Alcoa fans. Alcoa beat Grace 49-0, while Knox Central beat Letcher County Central (on the level of a Gibbs or Loudon) 49-22. It sounds like both teams expect to score, so you might get a pretty fun game if you go.
• Dobyns-Bennett and Oak Ridge has a couple of interesting points to it. An Oak Ridge win marks their second straight non-region win over a top 50 team in the state, while a D-B win erases some of the sour feelings over their stomping at the hands of Greeneville
• Bearden-Cleveland is interesting, too. Bearden beat West 9-0 in a gross, awful game, but their defense was very impressive in the process. This is Cleveland’s first game of the season, which means they might pull out a lot of tricks. Bearden’s offense isn’t good, but Cleveland’s defense (30 points allowed per game) probably isn’t, either.
• Other games of interest: I don’t know why Austin-East and Wayne (OH) decided to play each other, but sure; both Hardin Valley and West could desperately use a win, as it can get both on the path towards a .500 or better season; Webb’s opening week loss to Evangelical Christian really puts them behind the 8-ball against a good Asheville team; both Jefferson County-Morristown East and York Institute-Coalfield are expected to be close; the battle of Loudon County between Loudon and Lenoir City is expected to go down to the wire; an Anderson County win over William Blount gets them to a 57% chance of 10-0, and that game has the highest total of the week at 64.7; the lowest total is Clinton-Seymour on Saturday at 36.8.

Good luck to all teams involved this week, and we’ll check back in next Thursday.

College football upset spotting, week four

As bad as I am at picking these games (1-9 now!), our system is working: it projected four Top 25 upsets last week. We got four exactly, and it was mostly my fault for picking the wrong games: the system correctly identified three potential areas for upsets with the 50-59% range (Memphis over #25 UCLA), 60-69% (Vanderbilt over #18 Kansas State), and 70-79% (San Diego State over #19 Stanford). It did expect a fourth upset from the 80-89% range, but we got that in 70-79%: Mississippi State destroying #12 LSU. So…we’re moving in the correct direction. That’s a positive! Amazingly, if I’d just picked every one of the 50-89% teams to lose last week, I’d have a better record (4-8) than I do on the season with my subjective picks. Fun times.

Anyway, here’s this week’s chart:

I mentioned previous weeks as being the potential “the best upsets happen on the worst weeks” weeks, but this might really be it. There’s two good games (the two Top 25 vs. Top 25 matches) and a whole lot of potentially close games that offer no serious appetite nationally. The ABC game (#4 Penn State at Iowa) got moved to 7:30 PM ET, which is ABC admitting they think this game’s pretty boring. Heck, the most interesting Top 25 vs. unranked opponent game of the week (#8 Michigan at Purdue) runs at 4 PM on FOX.

With all that said, this week has serious poll-toppling opportunities. Here’s the categories by win percentage for the week:

• 50-59% (5-2 (+1.02 above expectation) on the season, expected record of 1.08-0.92, 29.26% chance of 2-0): #17 Mississippi State (at #12 Georgia) (50.1%), #23 Utah (at Arizona) (58.4%)
• 60-69% (6-2 (+0.66) on the season, expected record of 2.67-1.33, 19.83% chance of 4-0): #22 San Diego State (at Air Force) (62.6%), #20 Florida (at Kentucky) (67.5%), #6 Oklahoma State (vs. #16 TCU) (67.6%), #24 Oregon (at Arizona State) (69.4%)
• 70-79% (5-3 (-0.99) on the season, expected record of 2.98-1.02, 30.84% chance of 4-0): #21 USF (vs. Temple) (71.6%), #7 Washington (at Colorado) (73.0%), #4 Penn State (at Iowa) (75.0%), #5 USC (at California) (78.6%)
• 80-89% (7-0 (+1.09) on the season, expected record of 4.26-0.74, 44.86% chance of 5-0): #14 Miami (FL) (vs. Toledo) (80.4%), #12 Florida State (vs. NC State) (82.8%), #8 Michigan (at Purdue) (86.5%), #15 Auburn (at Missouri) (87.5%), #3 Oklahoma (at Baylor) (88.7%)
• 90-99% (30-0 (+0.88) on the season, expected record of 6.65-0.35, 69.49% chance of 7-0): #25 LSU (vs. Syracuse) (90.0%), #1 Alabama (at Vanderbilt) (90.7%), #13 Virginia Tech (vs. Old Dominion) (93.8%), #18 Washington State (vs. Nevada) (95.0%), #2 Clemson (vs. Boston College) (97.5%), #19 Louisville (vs. Kent State) (98.9%), #10 Ohio State (vs. UNLV) (99.2%)

I mean…look at that. Even factoring in that some ranking systems probably have yet to fully factor in Missouri and Baylor’s suck, you can count…what, six potential upsets that are nearly impossible to envision? I can’t see Alabama losing to Vanderbilt, ever, and Clemson through Ohio State are safe, but…yeah, something weird’s gonna happen. We’re underperforming our usual upset totals, and regression to the mean is coming. It’s probably going to happen later in the year, but this week seems like it’s got a good shot.

Without rationalizing, here’s my picks, because I no longer care to rationalize picks that are 10% successful: #12 Georgia over #17 Mississippi State, Air Force over #22 San Diego State, Kentucky over #20 Florida, and Iowa over #4 Penn State. Why? Why not. Mostly because I can’t let myself pick Jim Harbaugh to lose to Purdue. I’d cry.

Look for four or five upsets this week, including a top five team potentially going down. The top five has just a 46.25% chance of staying intact for Week Five. Iowa over #4 Penn State? Sure! Why not. Cal beating #5 USC for the first time in like 14 years? It could happen! Vanderbilt? Nah, but they’re in a good place right now.

There will probably be an 80-99% range upset, too. Picking these games is a zero-sum game in itself because you look like an idiot when it’s wrong, but combined, they have just a 10.91-1.09 expected record this week and a 31.05% chance of going undefeated. There’s going to be a GIANT upset this week…let’s see who it is.

Two top ten teams losing this week? Absolutely. I have the top ten as a whole with a projected record of 7.57-1.43 and a chance of going 9-0 at just 19.59%. Typically, this means we get multiple big upsets, which…yes, let’s do it. Go Colorado!

What happens if it’s just a boring week with a couple upsets? Then we messed up somewhere along the line. The expected upsets for this week, within one standard deviation, are anywhere between 2.607 to 6.102. Two standard deviations (95% of outcomes): 0.859 to 7.849. We very rarely hit the second standard deviation, so that should put our range of upsets this week between 3 and 6.