College Football Bowl Games: The Statistical Aberration

Football is such a beautifully simple game. Get the ball from one end of the field to the other. Then the other team gets the opportunity to. Rinse and repeat.

The regular season is even simpler. Generally, just twelve games, maybe a conference championship game, and a bowl game a few weeks later. Compared to any other major sport in the world, no sport has as few regular seasons games than football, especially college football. But there is an aberration in college football's regular season.

Fourteen consecutive weeks followed by a hiccup of a game three to five weeks after the season ends. Instead of seguing straight into the bowl games, the NCAA allows a month wait before one last game.

When comparing conferences, records, winning percentages, player statistics, just about everything, the bowl turns out to be a statistical aberration. One of these things is not like the other.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Fremeau Efficency Index (FEI) is one of the best indicators of offensive and defensive efficency. "The game of football is basically divided into individual series of play, offense versus defense," writes Brian Fremeau, the creator of the index. "A team on offense advances the ball until the series results in either a defensive stop (turnover, turnover on downs, punt, failed field goal, blocked kick, safety) or offensive score (field goal, touchdown), after which its opponent begins its own offensive series. This basic, alternating series structure is familiar to even the most novice fan..."

The efficiency rating is easy to understand as well. How would you quantify the effectiveness of an offensive drive? Well, divide the number of drives by the number of points. A perfect efficiency of 1.0 would mean that the offense scored a touchdown on every single offensive drive. An efficiency of 0.5 would mean that the offense scored a field goal on every single offensive drive.

How effective is the FEI at predicting the winners of a game based on their FEI? Try a 75 percent success rate in predicting the winner of EVERY SINGLE regular season game in last year's college football season. For over 600 games in Division I college football, the FEI correctly predicted the winner in three out of four games.

Of the 34 post-season bowl games, we could expect the FEI to correctly predict the winner in 25 of the 34 games. But a curious thing happened. The FEI only correctly predicted 16 out of the 34 bowls, only 47 percent.

How could that be? How could a system that was so accurate during the regular season completely breakdown during the bowl season? The FEI is not broken, it's not wrong, it's not a predictor because we KNOW it's one of the best (if not the best). So how could this happen?

The bowl season is the aberation, not the regular season. This is why any kind of meaningful analysis between teams, conferences, players, etc. HAS to exclude the bowl games.