According to Massey Ratings, Calvin Underperformed Early This Season, Have Overperformed Recently

I won't pretend to know all of the intricacies of Kenneth Massey's "Massey Ratings" (one of the computer rankings used in college football's BCS rankings), but I do know most the basics. For each game (college basketball, in our case), the score, venue, and date are used as inputs into the computer system. The computer then does a massive 'best fit' calculation of sorts for every game played in the college basketball universe, and comes up with a rating for each team.

For a real explanation, visit Massey's FAQ and Theory pages.

One of the more interesting aspects of his ratings website is perhaps the predictions that his ratings allow. For instance, we see that Calvin is projected to have only a 16% chance of beating Whitworth tomorrow, and that the 'most likely' score is 78-68 in favor of the Pirates. That's cool and all, but what I'm going to look at are his retro-active predictions for the Knights.

As the season goes on and more data points are added to the system, the ratings for each team are adjusted, and so are the predictions for the games that have already happened. For instance, just before Calvin and Finlandia met on the eve of Thanksgiving, Massey said that Calvin was expected to win by 25 points. Now, a month later, the prediction page says that Calvin should win by 14.

I went back through the nine games that the Knights have played to see how the actual score lines up with the current "retro" prediction:

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