Leatherneck Nation

It's now August 1st and we are essentially 1 month away from the season opener on September 1st at Eastern Illinois. We're starting to see some preseason polls come out (and the MVFC one should be out in the next day or so)...so, here's what people think of how the MVFC will shape up this season.

Massey Ratings:
#1 - NDSU
#2 - UNI
#4 - ISUr
#5 - SDSU
#9 - WIU
#10 - YSU
#15 - SIU
#21 - ISUb
#22 - USD
#84 - MSU

And Massey Composite (averages a bunch of polls...currently 9):
#1 - NDSU
#3 - ISUr
#4 - UNI
#6 - SDSU
#19 - WIU
#21 - YSU
#34 - SIU
#37 - ISUb
#41 - USD
#98 - MSU

Also, in terms of strength of schedule, we move down a bit on the ranking this year (we were in the top 2 both of the last 2 years), and are currently #5 overall for SOS. We still have some strong OOC games against a decent EIU team and a very strong (offensively) Northern Arizona, as well as the $ game against one of the better G5 conference teams (Northern IL). We drop a bit due to swapping out Youngstown State for Missouri State (should be a much easier win).

I still think that pollsters may be a big high on Illinois State though...they've lost a significant % of their team on both sides of the ball. They have a pretty good WR, and apparently their new QB is fairly decent, but nothing like the QB/RB 1-2 punch they had last year. I think they'll be down a bit more than the polls say.

One of the guys from AGS runs a website where he gives really good breakdowns of each MVFC team going into the season. He's got the two ISU's posted so far:
http://thefcswedge.com/conference-previ ... ois-state/
http://thefcswedge.com/conference-previ ... ana-state/

And the AGS Preseason Poll is out now.
MVFC teams in the poll are:
#1 - NDSU
#2 - UNI
#7 - SDSU
#12 - ISUr
#19 - WIU
#21 - YSU

Also, Western opponents Northern Arizona (#17) and Eastern Illinois (#31) are in the ranking as well.

And the STATS Preseason All-America Teams are out too: http://www.fcs.football/cfb/story.asp?i ... 4568591304
Congrats to Brett Taylor for making the 3rd team. Although shame on STATS for picking 8 WRs across the three teams and no mention of Lance Lenoir....well....time to prove them all wrong.

MVFC Preseason Poll just came out...

[tweet]760467991616065536[/tweet]

And the MVFC Preseason Team as well: http://www.valley-football.org/news/def ... favorites/
WIU guys on the list: Lance Lenoir Jr., Jacob Judd, and Brett Taylor

New this year, the "Law and Order In the Valley" poll will be coming out as a week 1 sidebet for Pigskin Pick'em game. Should be available in about three weeks or so. Chance to pick up few extra bucks at end of regular season. Stay tuned for updates.

For reference...for those of you who are into this sort of thing...a couple of guys on AGS went through all FCS games last year prior to the season, using the Massey Ratings (http://www.masseyratings.com/rate.php?s ... &sub=11605) to predict games and comparing them to the Sagarin ratings (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/ncaaf/sagarin/) and seeing who did better at predicting the outcome of the games.

They ran the numbers on top 25, playoff, and other big games ("Game of the Week" kinda stuff), as well as for all FCS games...

Massey did better than Sagarin in every way, but it was close.

Top 25 games, playoff games, and Clenz's game of the week stuff:
Sagarin - 249 picked correctly, 74 picked incorrectly - 77.1% accurate
Massey - 258 & 65 - 79.9% accurate

For every FCS game played last year, Massey went 633-154 when picking the week before the game - 80.43% accurate.

For every FCS game played last year, Massey went 590-168 when he picked every game that would be played in the 2015 campaign before the season even began - 77.84% accurate when he didn't even have the option of taking injury and field conditions into consideration.

Also, Massey starts off more accurate than Sagarin in the beginning of the season by a nice margin, but as the year goes on, they kind of balance out together.

So...77.84% accurate just at the start of the season. Currently, Massey's rating has us at 9th overall in the FCS and 5th in the MVFC.
Some of you may remember from previous years, his system also breaks down the % chances of winning each of the game and the "projected" score.

Currently, for our 2016 season, here's what he has our chances of winning each game as being (over 50% means we're favored):
@ EIU - 66%
NAU - 76%
@NIU - 26%
@SDSU - 31%
ISUb - 72%
@MSU - 89%
NDSU - 26%
@USD - 56%
ISUr - 50%
UNI - 43%
@SIU - 48%

In my experience, anything within 10% points of 50% is practically a toss-up and is really down to how the teams play that day. So, it looks like a good chance of 3 wins, 3 losses, and 5 toss-ups.

Using the Massey numbers in ST's post above, we can run a "probability of k wins" forecast:

Probability of 0 wins: 0.0001
Probability of 1 wins: 0.0013
Probability of 2 wins: 0.0107
Probability of 3 wins: 0.0476
Probability of 4 wins: 0.1289
Probability of 5 wins: 0.2243
Probability of 6 wins: 0.2577
Probability of 7 wins: 0.1963
Probability of 8 wins: 0.0975
Probability of 9 wins: 0.0301
Probability of 10 wins: 0.0052
Probability of 11 wins: 0.0004

So, somewhere in the range of 4 to 7 wins looks very likely this year. BTW, that range is one win more than was forecasted going into last year.

IMO, first two games will set the tone for the year. Walk away with wins in both of those and lean toward 7 or maybe 8 wins.