There is a Division I college football game scheduled for this Saturday. Central Arkansas is scheduled to play Austin Peay in Montgomery in the 2020 FCS Kickoff, a neutral-site season-opener for a season that does not fully exist at the FCS level, with the FCS National Championship in the process of being (attempted to be) scheduled for the spring. In the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr…Okay, so we’re doin’ this.
By the looks of it, at least one Division I football game will be played, with more scheduled next week including FBS games beginning on Thursday, nine days from today. On Labor Day, BYU and Navy are scheduled to play. On Thursday, September 10th, Miami is scheduled to host UAB in the first game featuring a Power Five team, with conference games in the ACC slated to begin that Saturday, the 12th. Meanwhile, coronavirus cases are surging at Alabama, UNC, and NC State, to name a few schools, with NC State recently pausing football practices. Notre Dame is struggling to contain an outbreak of its own—and, it should be noted, has yet to replace Western Michigan as its nonconference opponent, though there are rumors South Florida will travel to South Bend for a game September 19th. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have come out with nothing resembling a definitive plan for winter or spring football, nor has the NCAA announced such a plan for the FCS.
In other words, things remain uncertain, though we do appear likely to at least see some college football this fall.
If you’re familiar with The Barking Crow, you know that our college football and college basketball probability models are a big part of what I specifically work on here. We’ve had success over the last few years with models for the College Football Playoff, FCS Bracketology, the NIT, and the men’s basketball edition of the NCAA Tournament. We’re looking to build on all of those, and to expand throughout college sports. Our initial plan for the 2020-21 college sports season was to bring back our FCS model, expand our College Football Playoff model to include other bowls (and more detailed, interactive features), expand our men’s basketball model, and build similar models in women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s ice hockey, men’s and women’s lacrosse, baseball, and softball.
Obviously, those plans have shifted. We’ve been in a holding pattern on college football. Women’s volleyball and men’s & women’s soccer, the three other fall-championship sports on our radar, all seem to be angling for a spring season. It’s unclear whether hockey and basketball will start on time—or play at all when by the time all’s said and done.
For the time being, we’re scaling back our plans for our College Football Playoff model and making no movements on other models for at least the next month or so. If the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 continue to progress towards the College Football Playoff, we’ll have a probability model for which teams make it which we’ll roll it out sometime before conference games start. We can’t promise much more than that. We may roll it out next week. We may roll it out after Labor Day. If the ACC delays, we may wait until closer to the 26th, when the Big 12 and SEC are scheduled to begin their conference play. At a minimum, the model will include what it included last year: playoff probabilities for each team, conference championship probabilities, and national championship probabilities. We’d still like to at least test some of our more detailed, interactive features (allowing readers to explore the playoff impact of specific win-loss scenarios, for example), but we can’t promise those, and if we do roll them out, they’re likely to come in more of a beta form than anything that looks good. They’d also likely be released midway through the season.
For the immediate future, we’re working on things that would be useful to know in any season: How much teams’ performance changes as a conventional season goes along (and how that correlates with results), how to best model the College Football Playoff selection committee’s process, how bowls choose between teams when given the opportunity to choose. Next week, if nothing’s blown up, we’ll turn towards building out the actual guts of our model and figuring out how best we can incorporate coronavirus-centric uncertainty into teams’ outcomes. From there, it becomes a matter of how robust we can make the model and how to build the visual components on our site.
Stay tuned, and thanks as always for your readership.
