If a team is not favored to win even once in a set of games, would you expect that squad to win one of those games or not?
I pose this question because yesterday, college football personality Josh Pate had this to say about Florida’s famously brutal schedule: “Florida’s last 5 games alone may qualify as the toughest schedule in the country. *THEORETICALLY* the #15 team in the country would be expected to go 0-5 in that stretch.”
If you don’t remember off the top of your head, the Gators’ final five games are as follows in consecutive weeks: versus Georgia in Jacksonville, at Texas, home against LSU, home against Ole Miss, and at FSU. In the first pass of SP+ ratings from February, those teams in that order are ranked No. 1, No. 4, No. 10, No. 8, and No. 12.
So, in theory, the No. 15 team in the country might not be favored in any of those games. If it was going to avoid being an underdog at any point, the best shot would be the home game against No. 10, if home field advantage could swing the spread.
Right now, UF is not expected to be the No. 15 team in the country. It’s No. 33 in those early, pre-spring ratings. On a neutral field, SP+ would favor Georgia by 25.9 points, Texas by 20.1, LSU by 14.9, Ole Miss by 16.6, and FSU by 11.4. The actual No. 15 team in the ratings is Tennessee, which is 1.6 points behind No. 12 FSU on a neutral field and 16.1 points behind No. 1 Georgia on a neutral field.
Back to the original question. Right now, the Gators would not be favored to win any particular game. They would be pretty strong underdogs in all of them. Should you expect Florida to win any of them?
From a probability standpoint, the answer could be yes.
Consider the situation where a team has a 20% chance to win in each of five games. Such a team would not be favored to win any of them. It wouldn’t just be an underdog, but quite possibly a strong underdog at that.
And yet the probability of this situation says the likeliest outcome is that the team goes 1-4 in that stretch. A 20% chance of something happening is the same as saying there’s a 1-in-5 chance of it occurring. Here the thing that might occur is winning a football game, so the math says the team should win one of the five games.
This hypothetical team going O-fer is still well within the bounds of realistic outcomes. They’re not somehow guaranteed to win a game, but the chances of it might be better than you expect.
The logic behind this should be intuitive on some level. Take a situation where a team is somehow exactly a one-point underdog in all 12 of its regular season games. The squad isn’t favored in a single contest. Do you expect them to go 0-12?
Of course not. They’re perpetual underdogs, but only just. You’d probably expect them to go 6-6 or 5-7, because a one-point deficit is practically a coin toss.
The same thing works when teams are underdogs by a lot more than one point. If they’re down enough points in the spread to have only a 25% chance of winning, they still will win one out of four times if you could play that game over and over. Their chances of claiming victory are the same as flipping heads twice in a row, a rather quotidian outcome.
You can use percent chances of winning games as a way of coming up with a win total for a team. A number of advanced stats systems do exactly that. You take the decimal format of the chances of winning — turn 33% into 0.33 — and then add those up for each game. Voila, you have a win total for the season.
I did that using the February SP+ numbers. Again, these are out-of-date, but they’re available and not built on nothing. Consider this an exercise for illustrative purposes. Also, I didn’t do any home field advantage adjustments; these are all on hypothetical neutral fields.
The first step was making up all the point spreads. Having done so, the Gators would be favored in just four games: Samford, Mississippi State, UCF, and Kentucky. Yikes.
Next, you have to convert the spreads into chances of winning. Thankfully, someone has already made a conversion table. I rounded the SP+ lines to the nearest 0.5 and used the values in the chart. I also assigned UF a win probability of 100% for the Samford game since there aren’t any FCS ratings and the Gators will be a big favorite at home.
In the end, these figures have Florida with a predicted win total of 4.4. Across the final five-game gauntlet, they have just 0.43 expected wins.
So that’s it then, pack it in and send Billy his walking papers now? Not so fast.
For one thing, unexpected things do happen. Say it with me: That’s Why They Play The Games.
For another, the SP+ numbers I used here really are limited and will be updated closer to the season. I don’t know how much the spring portal will move teams around, but these figures aren’t final.
And finally, I think these numbers overrate several of the Gators’ opponents.
I am very skeptical of FSU being a top 15 team given what it lost. Yes, Mike Norvell did well in the portal given all his transfer draft picks, but those dudes were accumulated over multiple years. You can’t replace them like-for-like in one offseason, and he didn’t.
SP+ then has Texas A&M at No. 13, a poll height that the Aggies have finished at or above twice this century (2012, 2020). They’ve had tons of roster turnover and have a brand new coaching staff. The new staff might be better than the last one, but I think they’ve got a rough transitional year to get through before Mike Elko could get things rolling. Plus, that one’s at home for UF.
LSU at No. 10 is a bit eye-watering considering how awful their defense was last year and how they failed to significantly upgrade it in the portal. Brian Kelly fired more assistants on that side of the ball than Billy Napier did, but he took a long time to fill in all the holes and it bit them in their transfer recruiting.
Napier replaced his dismissed assistants promptly and may have landed at least one starter at each level of the defense from the portal: DL Joey Slackman, LB Grayson Howard, and S Asa Turner. Napier may also have fallen bass-ackward into getting the veteran DC presence the team has sorely lacked for two years when he got Ron Roberts to replace the bolting Jay Bateman. LSU will still have a good offense, but they won’t have a future Heisman winner like last year (and they lost their OC, who went back to Notre Dame). Unless Napier’s already been canned by November 16 and the team is tanking as a result, I don’t buy the Gators a two-touchdown underdog to the Tigers.
Anyway, the answer to the original question is “yes”. A team that isn’t favored to win any of a stretch of games still can be expected to win some number of them. And if I am right about LSU and FSU not being as good as their preseason projections, I could see the Gators going 1-4 or even a respectable 2-3 in their vaunted season-ending gauntlet.