With a good portion of the key non-conference games for the conference over I thought I'd take a look to see how we stand very early as far as number of bowl-eligible teams.

Basically, I'm using to a computer program to do exactly what ESPN FPI does to calculate the odds of winning the conference and expected number of wins...simulate the remainder of the season 10000 times using FPI win probabilities and count the number of bowl-eligible teams in each season.

This is the percent of simulated seasons where each team got at least 6 wins:
Appalachian State....99.8%
Ark State...............98.6%
Troy.....................96.6%
Georgia Southern....96.0%
Coastal.................78.0%
ULM.....................73.0%
Louisiana..............16.4%
Texas State...........11.5%
South Alabama.........7.0%
Georgia State...........6.3%

And here's the number of simulated seasons with each possible number of bowl-eligible teams:
0-2:..... None
3:......4 (0.04%)
4:....292 (2.9%)
5:...2865 (28.7%)
6:...5162 (51.6%)
7:...1572 (15.7%)
8:....100 (1%)
9:......5 (0.05%)
10:.......None

Basically, 95% chance of 5-7 teams. Seems about right to me. When you win some non-conference games like we have this year, the bowl math starts looking better toward the latter part of the season. Conference wins are a zero-sum game, but non-conference wins don't deprive other conference teams of a win.

Coastal's remaining schedule is interesting. They don't have a lot of home games left until November. All 4 of their league home games are against the Top 5 teams in the league coming in. That could either help or hurt them. Upside is that increases the chances of an upset, the downside is it hurts their chances against the bottom half of the league playing them all away. They don't play Texas State this year, and still have a trip to Umass. I'm not going to make a call on them getting eligible till after they play in Lafayette this weekend. That game will tell us a lot

ULM's schedule leads me to believe they get there. They don't play App which is a positive. There's a negative with a P5 game in Ole Miss still left, but provided they win the games they are favored to win, they should get there. Some of those games aren't cupcakes though. They have to play @ GSU and @ Coastal, neither of which is going to be easy. They probably need to win one of those games to ensure they get to 6 wins.

Southern's schedule is ridiculously easy. They should get there provided they don't collapse monumentally. They have a trip to NMSU where they should be heavily favored, and they also have Texas State and USA Left. Win those, and they'll need just one more win to lock it up. I am not sure about FPI's 96 percent chances though. FPI has them with like a 70 percent chance of beating AState at home in that list, and while I certainly agree they could win that game, there's no way I'd make them a 70 percent favorite.

(09-20-2018 12:52 PM)chiefsfan Wrote:  Coastal's remaining schedule is interesting. They don't have a lot of home games left until November. All 4 of their league home games are against the Top 5 teams in the league coming in. That could either help or hurt them. Upside is that increases the chances of an upset, the downside is it hurts their chances against the bottom half of the league playing them all away. They don't play Texas State this year, and still have a trip to Umass. I'm not going to make a call on them getting eligible till after they play in Lafayette this weekend. That game will tell us a lot

ULM's schedule leads me to believe they get there. They don't play App which is a positive. There's a negative with a P5 game in Ole Miss still left, but provided they win the games they are favored to win, they should get there. Some of those games aren't cupcakes though. They have to play @ GSU and @ Coastal, neither of which is going to be easy. They probably need to win one of those games to ensure they get to 6 wins.

Southern's schedule is ridiculously easy. They should get there provided they don't collapse monumentally. They have a trip to NMSU where they should be heavily favored, and they also have Texas State and USA Left. Win those, and they'll need just one more win to lock it up. I am not sure about FPI's 96 percent chances though. FPI has them with like a 70 percent chance of beating AState at home in that list, and while I certainly agree they could win that game, there's no way I'd make them a 70 percent favorite.

I looked at ESPN's FPI today and GS is favored in all of our remaining games except home vs App. The stAte game is only 56% chance which is close to a toss up. Other close games on GS's schedule are @ ULM and @ Coastal according to the most up to date ESPN FPI. They say we most likely go 8-4 this season and after last year I'd take that for sure.

BTW, some might say having a more balanced conference helps in getting more BE teams, so I ran a second simulation with these changes:
1. Changed all of our non-conference FBS wins to losses except for App-UNCC
2. Changed Georgia State Kennesaw to a loss for GSU.
3. Changed all conference win probabilities above 60% to 60% and all win probabilities below 40% to 40% (to simulate conference parity).

The average number of bowl-eligible teams dropped from 5.7 to 5.2. Getting non-conference wins arguably matters more than hoping 40 conference wins will be distributed among 10 teams as evenly as possible. We're basically looking at having at least 7 of our 10 teams with non-losing OOC records, and it could be more if South, State, and Texas State can get wins this weekend. That's big.

(09-20-2018 10:30 AM)EigenEagle Wrote:  Basically, I'm using to a computer program to do exactly what ESPN FPI does to calculate the odds of winning the conference and expected number of wins...simulate the remainder of the season 10000 times using FPI win probabilities and count the number of bowl-eligible teams in each season.

Could you explain this more in detail?
What computer program did you use?