Minnesota Football Game Predictions: San Jose State Spartans

Last week was super depressing. Not only did we lose, and big, but whatever deity Pat Fitzgerald managed to anger has turned its eyes upon us after chewing up the Evanston kitties. At least there's beer. There's always beer.

Models

I'm always making tiny little adjustments to the models during the season, largely because I want to experiment and see if tinkering will improve performance, or have the output data make a little more sense. This week's adjustment is based upon a naturally upward bias to the results of previous games. I'm toying around with doing the same thing but with a lower bias, and eventually looking at a synthesis between the two. Point being, I'm going to play around with the math to figure out which solution works the best given the data. Cool story broseph.

Here's your crap top 25!

Rank	Team	Log5Prob	Change
1	Florida State	0.927	0
2	Baylor	0.926	0
3	Oregon	0.913	1
4	Auburn	0.896	-1
5	LSU	0.893	2
6	Texas A&M	0.883	3
7	Stanford	0.882	1
8	USC	0.879	-3
9	Oklahoma	0.876	4
10	Mississippi	0.873	1
11	Mississippi State	0.87	4
12	Notre Dame	0.863	5
13	UCLA	0.86	-3
14	Alabama	0.851	-8
15	Oklahoma State	0.844	6
16	Florida	0.842	0
17	Michigan State	0.836	-3
18	Arizona	0.835	2
19	Missouri	0.834	8
20	Georgia	0.833	-8
21	Ohio State	0.832	1
22	Louisville	0.831	3
23	Wisconsin	0.824	-5
24	BYU	0.817	-5
25	Texas	0.808	-1
36	Minnesota	0.748	-5
94	San Jose State	0.342	-3

We're dropping, which is to be expected. Bayesian adjustments y'all!

On the plus side, SJSU isn't very good. They may be as weak an opponent as Eastern Illinois, which is nice on the one hand because we're so banged up but may not in any way prepare us for Michigan in two weeks. Sweet.

Game time!

Gopher Win Probability	85.1%
Predicted Margin of Victory	+17
Current Vegas Spread	Gophers -10
Current Vegas Over/Under	51.5

Again, M&B thinks SJSU is crap -- much more than Vegas. I think the sportsbooks are overweighting the last game and our injuries, and underweighting GERG. That's probably not smart.

This game is going to feature a lot of rushing attempts by us, since our quarterback is very injured and the coaches will see to is Chris Streveler doesn't throw more than 12 times. There's a blueprint for this sort of game, and it looks like this. Minus the David Fales part, of course.

Win comfortably and get out of this game with all limbs and joints intact.

Bottles

Man, the vibe around town is just funky. Getting your ass kicked will do that, but still.

To cheer us all up, let's remember the things we are not:

- Iowa (LOL)

- Wisconsin (because eff them and the whole retched state)

- Tampa Bay Bucs (First 3 quarters looks like Oregon vs. an FCS team)

- Indiana/Illinois (both teams should be scraped for spare parts. The rest of the B1G could use them).

- USC (wait, what?)

- Roger Goodell (soon to be starring in his own Southwest Airlines commercial)

- Everything else that is terrible.

To celebrate that we are not any of these things, we'll raise a bottle of Anchor Porter. It's not exactly a San Jose beer, but San Fran is close enough and we're not exactly picky after a loss.

Cheers everyone, and here's to getting back on the winning track!