Today officially marks that we are 100 days away from when the Hobart College Statesmen kickoff their 126th season of college football. As we know, Team 126 has some high expectations in what's become one of the most competitive conferences in the East Region.
While the Statesmen faithful are very bullish on this season's prospects, some prognosticators are a little skeptical of Hobart's chances. One of these is a former D3FB player (Wabash College), HSFB coach and structural engineer Logan Hansen.
Hansen, who's based in Iowa and occasionally collaborates with D3football.com, has developed an interesting ranking and predictive model over the last couple of years using historical data and regression analysis to predict future results.
In the current model, Hobart is ranked 48th out of 237 teams, given the NESCAC and a couple of other teams are not included because of their inability / lack of participation in OOC games and the NCAA playoffs. According to the stats, the Statesmen are predicted to finish the 2019 season with a 6-4, 4-2 record (technically a 6.4-3.6 record, which basically allows the possibility of the Statesmen winning a close one and ending up 7-3 with a certain level of probability), with at least two of those losses coming in LL play. While being considered in the Top 20% of all D3FB teams and a winning season is certainly not a bad thing, I think most Hobart fans would view a 6-4 finish, even with one of the toughest schedules in the East Region, as disappointing.
Looking more closely, you can infer that these are the predicted results for Hobart:
Statesmen Opponent (Hansen Ranking):
vs. Brockport (17) L
vs. SUNY-M (94) W
vs. Rowan (124) W
vs. Montclair St. (70) model leans towards a W for Hobart
vs. Union (52) leans towards a L for Hobart (more on this below)
vs. RPI (37) L
vs. IC (39) L
vs. SLU (109) W
vs. Buff St (148) W
vs. UofR (199) W
What's interesting about the above is that the model values Union higher than Montclair State, the latter of which will be returning 18 starters from last year's 8-2 campaign in the NJAC (one of those losses being a 24-17 decision to Frostburg State which has left the conference and is now a D2 program) - which in my opinion, is the strongest East Region conference overall.
To be fair, the model will be updated with this type of returning player data, including the fact Hobart will be returning a lot of starters as well, later this summer. I'd recommend checking back in August to see how these ratings and predictions change based on this information (which will be included in the annual D3football.com "Kickoff 2019" online magazine).
Given the prediction for Union to end up 4-2 in the LL, you can also infer that the model sees a number of ways LL teams will "beat each other up" (neither Ithaca nor RPI are predicted to be undefeated in the LL either) and/or the Hobart-Union game being the one that will decide whether Hobart or Union ends up 7-3 or 6-4, basically. The model also has Montclair getting the majority (2.5) of it's predicted 3.5 losses from NJAC play, insinuating that the Red Hawks could win all of their three OCC games (or potentially lose to Hobart).
While there are certain flaws to the model, it does provide some interesting musings and conversation points in the slow off-season, summer days.
Let the countdown to kickoff officially begin! I'll have some other updates throughout the summer months as we get closer to preseason camp (and creep towards and eventually pass having 250K views of this blog site - thank you!).
Thanks again for reading and go 'Bart!
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