East Tennessee high school football projections, week 9

Another good week – 24-3 (88.9%) for week 8, and now 204-37 (84.6%) on the season. Pretty cool!

I’ll just repeat what I said last week: Thank you to everyone who’s sent this out or has told someone they know about it or, in some way, is helping publicize these projections. They’re fun to do, and even if I only reach one fan of a smaller school, it means the world to me that someone at Oliver Springs is getting to see a computer projection model of their football team.

As we close in on the state playoffs, I’m going to start working in likelihoods of seeding finish if at all possible. This is so coaches, fans, and players can start envisioning which team(s) they’ll draw in the first round.

As a reminder, you can keep track of the season via this spreadsheet:

Click over to your favorite team’s page for fully updated win projections throughout the season. I’ve reorganized the tab to show the projected standings in each region, though, of course, it only covers the 51 teams that this site covers. Next week, I’ll attempt to add tabs that project the likelihood of region winners and maybe some other stuff. Just TWO weeks left in the season after this week, which means we’re nearing the playoff hunt.

Here’s this week’s games and their projected outcomes. Remember, ALL projected scores are rounded to the nearest whole number, so that’s why you see some wacky ones:

THURSDAY

• Farragut 26, Bearden 16
• Sevier County 24, Seymour 23
• Austin-East 39, Pigeon Forge 6

FRIDAY

• Greeneville 34, Elizabethton 22
• Maryville 40, Ooltewah 18
• Dobyns-Bennett 30, Hardin Valley 26
• Chattanooga Christian 22, Webb 19
• Fulton 41, Campbell County 10
• Science Hill 38, Morristown West 17
• Alcoa 52, Kingston 0
• Daniel Boone 38, Cocke County 17
• Anderson County 34, Chattanooga Central 17
• McMinn County 31, William Blount 20
• Oak Ridge 42, Clinton 4
• Gibbs 29, Halls 23
• Notre Dame 41, Grace Christian 15
• Greenback 41, Harriman 9
• Bradley Central 48, Heritage 7
• Knoxville Catholic 51, Walker Valley 6
• Northview 31, Scott 21
• Morristown East 33, Volunteer 17
• Rockwood 29, Wartburg 14
• Loudon 25, Sweetwater 21
• Friendship 44, King’s Academy 13
• Grainger 38, Sullivan Central 15
• Midway 42, Sunbright 2
• Cumberland Gap 39, Cosby 8

Notes on this week’s games…

• Farragut-Bearden decides who wins 6A-1. Only Hardin Valley could change this, and they’d have to win out despite being underdogs in their remaining three games. (The odds of this are 0.5%.) This is a massively important game, simply because a Farragut loss means they’d likely draw Maryville in the second round. What a brutal ending to a great season that would be. For Bearden, Science Hill owns the tiebreaker with them and has a 76% chance of winning their final two games. Bearden’s surprising and fun season would finish by losing home-field advantage in the first round and having to travel to Ooltewah.
• Sevier County-Seymour is also important, because it continues a fairly interesting battle for the final playoff spot in 5A-2. Both still have to play Halls, who hold the spot right now, and Seymour holds a loss to fifth-place Carter, which could end up being important.
• The game of the week outside of Knoxville is easily Elizabethton-Greeneville, where the two best teams in 4A (yes, it’s true) will play to win 4A-1. A loss doesn’t kill either team, though second place in 4A-1 will face Anderson County in the second round. (The winner will play them or the loser of this game in the quarterfinals.) It would also end Greeneville’s 22-game winning streak, the second-longest in the state and T-30th longest in America. This is the best Elizabethton team since the group that went to the 3A semifinals in 2009, so it’s going to be a fun one.
• Hardin Valley and Dobyns-Bennett is essentially a playoff play-in game. A loss here means Hardin Valley goes into their final two games as double-digit underdogs at 2-2 in the region, which very likely means no playoff berth. A win, and they shove Dobyns-Bennett to 1-3 with the tiebreaker over them. The winner will play Maryville in the first round.
• Chattanooga Christian-Webb is of interest, as the winner is likely to finish second in AA-E and would play the winner of the CAK/Grace/Silverdale tiebreaker in fourth. The loser likely finishes third and plays the loser of Franklin Road Academy/Battle Ground Academy in round one.
• Chattanooga Central-Anderson County is notable for one reason only: it’s probably the best chance for Anderson County to drop a regular season game. Chatt Central are 17 point underdogs, but no game for ACHS has had a spread this close since the August William Blount game where ACHS had to come back from a 10-point deficit.
• Gibbs-Halls will decide third place in 5A-2. They’d play the loser of David Crockett/Daniel Boone, likely.
• Sullivan Central-Grainger has little meaning, but Sullivan Central won their first game in 37 tries last Friday. That’s cool.

Now, for season-long updates. You can view the Running Win Totals on the spreadsheet above.

• Biggest overachievers versus preseason expectations: Midway (+3.07 wins above preseason projection), Oliver Springs (+2.92), Union County (+2.14), Cocke County (+2.11), Bearden (+2.05).
• Biggest underachievers: Pigeon Forge (-3.71 wins below preseason projection), King’s Academy (-3.29), Loudon (-3.17), Sunbright (-2.75), Kingston (-2.66).
• Five teams still remain in contention to finish the regular season without a loss. They are: Alcoa (95.8% chance of 10-0), Greenback (84.9%), Greeneville (76.4%), Farragut (68.1%), and Anderson County (67.5%).
• There are just two teams still in contention for the Defeated (0-9 or 0-10) season: Heritage (98.9% chance of 0-10) and King’s Academy (30.1% chance of 0-9).

Lastly, I have a crowdsourcing request if you’ve read this far. If you would be interested in a state-wide playoff projection involving all ~210 teams that would make the field, please Tweet me @gyratestats or email statsbywill@gmail.com. I could use your help.

Good luck to all teams this week!

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.

Predicting the 2016-17 NBA season using projected starting lineups

As a note up front, this is entirely unscientific and was only done for me to get an early cut at what I think might happen in the NBA this winter. I love this sport and am grateful for the predictive metrics that have come to the forefront over the last few years. One of these – though an extremely imperfect science and tool – is 538’s CARMELO ratings.

I’m intrigued by these because they seem to be one of the few freely-available tools to measure a player’s future performance that essentially everyone with some form of basketball knowledge can understand. They’re far from perfect and I much prefer Nathan Walker (@bbstats) and @NBAcouchside‘s RAPM/RPM/BPM work on Twitter and other sites, but this is what someone who isn’t that great at Excel can develop. (Not much.)

Anyway, I wanted a rational first look at what the NBA standings might look like next fall. I did this in a quick amount of time and am looking forward to better versions of this, but some of the results were interesting enough that I thought writing them out may help. I took the probable starting lineups for each team, used their projected RPM from 538, and measured out who has the best five players. This is imperfect for the following reasons:

• This is no way measures team depth;
• The projections are very imperfect, as they only really measure box-score stats and not player tracking or movement;
• There are no projections for international players like Dragan Bender;
• All but three lineups were projected in positive plus-minus. This seems odd to me and the Basketball-Reference Lineup Tool is down at the moment to confirm or deny my suspicions.

But:

• This gives a reasonable expectation for each team’s somewhat-likely starting lineup;
• All the answers that I came up with made a lot of sense, surprisingly;
• I had little else to do on a Thursday, and college football doesn’t start for nearly two months.

So, without further waste of words, here’s the Eastern Conference by projected starting lineup RPM. This is a first cut, and actual win projections won’t come for some time, but I’ll see what I can do.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

1. Cleveland (13.4)
2. Boston (8.1)
3. Toronto (7.9)
4. Charlotte (7.2)
5. Chicago (5.5)
6. Washington (5.1)
7. Detroit (3.8)
8. New York (3.3)
9. Atlanta (3.1)
10. Orlando (2.9)
11. Miami (2.7)
12. Indiana (2.1)
13. Milwaukee (2)
14. Philadelphia (-2.6)
15. Brooklyn (-5.5)

This confirmed my general thoughts about the Eastern Conference: there is a clear #1 and a clear bottom two, though I was surprised at how much worse Brooklyn’s lineup was than Philly’s. (CARMELO is hanging a lot on Ben Simmons developing quickly, which I’m questionable of.) The obvious shockers are Chicago and their embarrassing offseason rolling in as the #5 seed and Washington’s very weird roster at #6. These are hard to defend, but then again I would’ve told you last year that the Pelicans seemed like a lock for the #6 seed or higher and Dallas had little chance of a playoff bid. Who knows?

I’m also surprised at how close Charlotte is to the Boston/Toronto race for #2, though they have a very solid roster with good players nearly all around. Plus, getting rid of Jeremy Lin was a mild upgrade, actually. There’s something perfect about this for the East – just four teams seem like safe playoff picks.

WESTERN CONFERENCE

1. Golden State (22.8)
2. San Antonio (12.4)
3. Los Angeles Clippers (11.8)
4. Utah (11)
5. Oklahoma City (8.8)
6. Houston (7.4)
7. Portland (6.4)
8. Minnesota (4.8)
9. New Orleans (4.6)
10. Memphis (4.3)
11. Dallas (3.4)
12. Denver (3.4)
13. Sacramento (1.7)
14. Phoenix (0.9)
15. Los Angeles Lakers (-3.9)

This was much less surprising. Golden State reigns supreme; San Antonio and the Clippers will fight it out for #2 depending on health of each individual roster; Utah is a playoff lock even though the rapid rise to #4 is a little unusual; Oklahoma City’s roster is still good; Houston can’t possibly be worse than last year; Portland faces an uphill climb but still has the third-best coach in the conference and the second-best backcourt. What fascinates me is the potential five-team race for one spot – the #8 seed. I had Minnesota barely beating out New Orleans (a ton hinges on Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine), but all five teams had good cases: New Orleans can’t possibly have that many injuries again, Memphis added Chandler Parsons, Dallas has Rick Carlisle, and Denver’s roster appears to be on the rise.