Troy @ MTSU

[Joe_Shabadoo]

Degenerates, let's do this.

I'm not going big on this, so this will be a cursory look-in.

What I find that's interesting is how much The Blue Raiders seem to miss the game charts of Manny Diaz after he went to greener pastures in Starkville.

If you're not privy to Footballoutsiders.com, then you should check out the basic S&P ratings for a quick check to get started.

Here's a run-down of this metric:

The S&P+ Ratings are a college football ratings system derived from the play-by-play data of all 800+ of a season's FBS college football games (and 140,000+ plays). There are three key components to the S&P+:

• Success Rate: A common Football Outsiders tool used to measure efficiency by determining whether every play of a given game was successful or not. The terms of success in college football: 50 percent of necessary yardage on first down, 70 percent on second down, and 100 percent on third and fourth down.
• EqPts Per Play (PPP): An explosiveness measure derived from determining the point value of every yard line (based on the expected number of points an offense could expect to score from that yard line) and, therefore, every play of a given game.
• Opponent adjustments: Success Rate and PPP combine to form S&P, an OPS-like measure for football. Then each team's S&P output for a given category (Rushing/Passing on either Standard Downs or Passing Downs) is compared to the expected output based upon their opponents and their opponents' opponents. This is a schedule-based adjustment designed to reward tougher schedules and punish weaker ones.

Now, back to what I conisdered interesting enough:

In '09 MTSU finished the year 21st in the nation defensively, while through 4 games this season they are the 2nd-worst FBS team (119 out of 120) [72nd, offensively].

Respectively, Troy:

• 42nd, defensively
• 73rd, offensively

This isn't something that should have a wholescale focus upon it, but I think this is a significant indicator of whether or not Rich Stockhill will finally be able to make this an actual "rivaly" for the might Palladium Trophy.

I think Dwight Dasher's return is a bit overblown after seeing his performance against this Trojan defense last season. He didn't shit the bed, but he was dinking and dunking all night for miniscule gains, and the running game was totally disrupted. I think that his presence is skewing the line in this game a bit anticipating public action to accomodate the 3-to-3.5 at home.

Taking Troy on the moneyline seems to hold the most value in my opinion.

Good luck.

[Joe_Shabadoo]

Fvck, I did it again.

Sorry.

Mods, can you please move this accordingly?