120: Sunday notes
A few notes ahead of Feast Week and a perfect rivalry game.
Happy Sunday.
Feast Week
College basketball is in full swing this week with tons of multiple-team events1. As the volume of games picks up, I’m starting to collect data for non-conference games.
Check it out here: https://byc.evidence.app/college-basketball/non-conference/
You can find head-to-head records, win percentages, and average opponent rating by result between two conferences. Plus an entire game log with point differentials for games between teams from different conferences.
Plan to start surfacing more men’s college hoops in the future, so stay tuned.
And you can still find the college football data in the same place. Team ratings and the latest college football playoff rankings will be updated this week.
Right now, you can find updated conference standings with point differentials: https://byc.evidence.app/college-football/by-conference/
And now, something a bit different.
A perfect rivalry game
We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou was right.
But she probably didn’t realize this might apply to NC State and North Carolina football. Two programs that are so similar that the win percentages are damn near identical over the last 70 years.
And the game scheduled for Saturday, November 30 is no different.
It would be an understatement to say there is friction between the fanbase and both coaching staffs. Next Saturday is an all-time anxiety bowl.
NC State was touted as a preseason college football playoff darkhorse, and yet, the Wolfpack aren’t even bowl eligible before Thanksgiving. State is 2-5 in league play and five games below .500 in ACC play under head coach Dave Doeren’s 12 year tenure.
Carolina’s head coaching situation is constipated. Whether you think it should end or not, no one really understands how or when it will end.
Mack Brown is a hall-of-fame coach that has outperformed every other UNC head coach between his first stint and current stint. And yet, the majority of Carolina fans are unhappy or even apathetic.
Why?
This brings us to the game on Saturday. While Doeren’s relationship with the Wolfpack fanbase is strained, the head coach has delivered one thing.
A win over its rivals.
NC State has won three consecutive games against Carolina, including a 39-20 thrashing in West Raleigh last season.
If we shrink the series between to the two teams back down to 2013 or the start of Doeren’s tenure, the numbers bring even more frustration for UNC.
Carolina has been favored in eight of the 11 games, but won just four those games. Here is a look at the series since 2013, including the point spreads prior to each game according to TeamRankings.com’s BetIQ tool.
What happens on Saturday could change the future of both programs, but how it happens is something we can't quite predict. And that's exactly what makes it a perfect rivalry game.
Two programs, mirror images of each other, both at crossroads, both with something to lose and something to gain.
Thanks for reading thus far, and enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday.
Stay tuned for college football and basketball data updates here, and check out the code for the table above here. Oh, and please subscribe if you so choose:
Calling these MTEs is bad branding, right? Multiple-team events sounds like a corporate retreat you would not want to go on.
Thanks for the shout-out. If you include UNC's 2008 and 2009 wins, which ARE NOT in those calculations, and count ties as half-wins, UNC has 1.5 more wins than NCSU since 1953, 443-441.5. https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/11963789/