The College Football Game Simulator
901 teams across the College Football Playoff Era (2014-2020). Game on!
Hello everyone! Hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the summer season. With the NFL Draft behind us, we hit our annual summer lull in the world of college football. Now seems like the perfect time to have a little fun, and that is exactly what we are going to do today! Have you ever wondered about the outcome of a hypothetical matchup? For example, if UCF got their shot at Alabama in 2017? Or even matchup’s across seasons, like 2019 LSU vs 2020 Alabama, or 2014 Ohio State? Well beginning today, there is a (shiny) app for that!
http://cfbnumbers.shinyapps.io/CFBSimulator
This is the college football simulator! There are 901 teams across the FBS from the College Football Playoff era (2014-2020). All you have to do is choose your teams, hit simulate, and a score will appear. Along with the final score, you will also see a box score for both QB’s and RB’s with simulated passing and rushing stats. Lets say for example you wanted to see that 2017 playoff matchup that never was:
Vindication for the Citronaut (None of that Golden Knight nonsense around here) faithful! Despite facing steep odds to win, McKenzie Milton puts on a show against the Crimson Tide and shows the world the underdog deserves a place at the table!
(Don’t ask how many times I had to simulate that, it was far too many)
Heres a quick version of how the app works. Home odds are calculated using ELO ratings (Same method to get 2021 win projections for the Power 5, as well as the Group of 5). Once we have our odds, a random binary generator is used (0,1), with the odds being the probability of the home team “winning” (drawing a 1). That 1 or 0 will dictate which team “wins” and thus has a higher score.
We have our odds, we have our winner, now we need some statistics to complete the story. For the most part these numbers are random with the exception of TDs (both passing and rushing), INTs, and Expected Points Added (EPA/Play). Naturally you cannot score more touchdowns than points, so some rules were put in place in order to make it *somewhat* realistic. Adding up a teams passing and rushing TD’s will get you within a TD of the final score, with the extra being chalked up to FGs, Safeties, or even a defensive score. EPA/Play will generally follow along the lines of positive values for the winners, negative values for the losers. Admittedly this isn’t the greatest way to do this, as someone with Milton’s stat line would be well past the 1+ EPA per play.
Thats the gist of it! This app was mainly for my amusement and as a way to learn how to build shiny apps. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun along the way! I hope you all enjoy playing around with it as much as I do. We all like to imagine the “what if?” in college football, and hopefully this helps you paint that picture.
If you missed the link:
http://cfbnumbers.shinyapps.io/CFBSimulator
If you want to dive in to the data like I do, check out @CFB_Data and @cfbfastR on Twitter, where you can learn how to get started in the world of College Football data analysis!
If you want to see more charts and one off analysis, follow my twitter page, @CFBNumbers