Updated Massey win probabilities for Michigan and Nebraska

Most teams are reliant on their best player.  Nebraska is reliant on Martinez.  Without Bell, Sparty loses to Boise and probably EMU.  Miller for Ohio.  Almost every team is going to be signficantly worse without their best player.

It's being negged because overly relying on Denard isn't the problem.  The problem is a lack of depth at QB, and the lack of depth at WR that necessitated the Gardner move.

Tacopants?

You do realize that the best rye on the planet is made in Iowa, yes?

I was kinda thinking the same thing, but we've all seen Iowa play , right?

I realize that I am making an assumption that this is still just a two horse race

and I partially said that for effect. I'd bet a lot that either Michigan or Nebraska goes to Indianapolis. Maybe typing that as a reply to a question actually seeking information was the wrong way to go, but I don't think the chances of Northwestern getting there are high at all, and Iowa would require a miracle.

The original post in the weekend thread was done before the results of the Nebraska game were incorporated into the Massey probabilities and thus were determined on the basis of a healthy Denard. As I've mentioned a couple of times above, the un-auto-correlated probabilities were evenly split 50/50 between Michigan and Nebraska at that point. So, yes, a QB injury obviously has a big impact, once you know an injury has happened. We went from 50/50 to 30/70, and that's before we know whether Denard's injury will linger. (To be precise, we went from 50/50 with a healthy Denard to 30/70 with a 1/8 chance that Denard will miss half of any particular game. And with a healthy or at least playable-if-slightly-dinged Martinez in both cases.)

But the odds of a season-changing multigame QB injury are a lot less than 100%, before it happens. With what seems like a reasonable estimate of the odds of a major incident like that--maybe 5% over a 4-game period? or 10%?--and applying it to all teams, you don't get a big shift in the two main probabilities. When you start trying to differentiate the reliance on key individuals among the teams you get into an area that probably neither of us has enough information to get anywhere with. What do you really know about the depth of Nebraska's squad or the quality of Martinez's backup? And they don't exactly have a defense that gives them a chance if their offense isn't moving the ball.

Of course you can probably (or maybe not, but that's another post I'm saving for the off-season) do better than these simple models if you want to pour a lot of time and analysis into it and make a lot of ad-hoc assumptions.

My assumption has the merit of being really simple, which makes it easier to see how it applies and where it could go wrong and also means I have time to actually set up the calculation in 20 minutes instead of wasting all my spare time on it.