Oregon – Maybe Not the “Lock” You Think

While looking at the 4 remaining major conference unbeatens (Oregon, Missouri, Auburn and Michigan State) I wondered what chances Oregon has to run the table from here on out.

After glancing at their schedule, my thought was “pretty good”. After all, they have games –

At USC
Washington
At Cal
Arizona
At Oregon State

Only Arizona is ranked. A pretty good chance to win out, no?

My next thought – can we put odds on it? Well, I think we can. And it isn’t the lock you might think.

Internet research led me to an invaluable find – a Phil Steele article laying out the odds that different Vegas spreads actually won a game.

Vegas, being Vegas, does a pretty fine job of predicting wins based on point spreads. The data from Steele’s article is below –

Favorite of	# of GMS	Lost Outright	%
31+ pts	382	5	1.3%
24.5-31	617	24	3.9%
17.5-24	1013	71	7.0%
14.5-17	650	88	13.5%
10.5-14	1146	242	21.1%
7.5-10	1056	279	26.4%
3.5-7	1930	658	34.1%
3 or less	1269	621	48.9%

To apply this to Oregon’s chances, we would need Vegas’ lines on the Duck's remaining games. While we have the line for the game at USC (opened at Oregon by 6.5), we don’t have lines for future games.

We do, however, have something that claims to predict games between any teams – Jeff Sagarin’s Ratings, which are used (modified) in the BCS.

Using Sagarin, he predicts Oregon to be 7.8 points better than USC at a neutral site, which would give the Ducks a 4.8 point advantage at USC.

In our odds chart above, either 4.8 or 6.5 tells us that, historically, USC has a 34.1% chance of winning. This is based on a large sample size of 2588 games.

So if USC would win 34.1% of the time, the Ducks win 65.9%.

Since Sagarin’s spread was reasonably close to Vegas, here’s what he would have for the rest of Oregon’s games (as point spreads) –

Washington	24.3
Cal	2.2
Arizona	8.7
Oregon St	8.1

The Cal one surprises me too, but Sagarin has them as his 8th best team per his Predictor, even with a 4-3 record.

Using these point spreads, we can estimate the chances of Oregon winning out. Including USC, here are Oregon’s chances to win each remaining individual game –

USC		0.659
Washington		0.961
Cal		0.659
Arizona		0.736
Oregon St		0.736

Just like you would multiply .50 times .50 to see the chance of getting two consecutive heads in a coin flip (.25 or 25% chance), you do the same here.

The results? 0.2261, or an only 22.6% chance that Oregon runs the table.

Less than 1 in 4.

Which begs the question – what are the similarly calculated chances for the other unbeatens? We will explore that in our next post.