What CalPreps.com says about the 2009 season

If you've never heard of CalPreps.com, don't sweat it, that just means you're not a stats dork like me. The site itself is pretty plain, unless you putting real teams in ficticious matchups. It allows you to select a team, and put them against any other team in the state and see how the projections work out on each teams' home field as well as a neutral site.

Well...here's how the site projects Orrville's 2009 season to go. All projections are based on the game being played on a neutral field.

Week 1 ----> Win vs. Northwest - 27-21
Week 2 ---> Win @ Triway - 31-14
Week 3 ---> Win vs. Copley - 34-7
Week 4 ---> Loss vs. Lexington - 22-28
Week 5 ---> Win @ Senior - 42-12
Week 6 ---> Win vs. Ashland - 28-8
Week 7 ---> Win @ West Holmes - 28-10
Week 8 ---> Win @ Madison - 35-7
Week 9 ---> Win @ Clear Fork - 31-8
Week 10 ---> Win vs. Wooster - 28-8

So, 9 wins and the only loss to Lexington. All but 1 of our wins are projected to be by at least 2 TD's. Not to shabby right?

As much as I'd take this outcome, you just can't do anything but look at this, and throw it in the trash. Games aren't played on paper. We SHOULD be a solid team this year, and a definite team to watch in Region 14, but it has to be proven on the field. Many things can affect a team's play. We've seen this play out already in the very early stages of the '09 season.

In these projections, only one team in Region 14 was projected to beat us and that was Genoa Area. So according to CalPreps, we have the ability, on paper, to be a regional finalist (at least).

To give CalPreps some credibility, their 2008 accuracy for Ohio games was 80%. According to them, picking the team with the better record (or the home team when teams have identical records) would have netted a 70% accuracy rating.

What they are saying is their projections better than what picking the better team would net. Their mark of 80% accuracy means they were ahead of the curve, for 2008 anyways, and that their projections have at least marginal credibility.

In looking at last years projections, they hit on 9 of 10 (missing only the West Holmes game), and hit the projection for the week 1 loss to Northwest square on the nose (and came scary close in weeks 2, 3, 4 & 9).

Again, doesn't take a rocket scientist, I think in my weekly predictions last year, I was 8 for 10....the same 80% rate that CalPreps achieved for the entire state.

Here's the link to CalPreps projection page. Have fun.