2016 Football Performance Ratings
Once again, I'm going to track the Rice Owls football team's Massey performance ratings this season, as well as those for the rest of the Conference USA teams and Rice's non-conference opponents. Unfortunately, I was rather busy the last couple of weeks and didn't have time to post the numbers until now. To review, the Massey performance rating is a measure of how the Owls performed in individual games as opposed to a rating calculated from season-long results. It's found by taking the power rating for Rice's opponent in Ken Massey's rating system, adjusted for homefield advantage (if the game is not played at a neutral site) and adding to it the score difference in the game (positive for a Rice win, negative for a loss). The result is a rating for each game played during the season. For example, in Rice's first game, a 46-14 loss to Western Kentucky, the performance rating would be WKU's power rating (currently 55.62, plus the Hilltoppers' homefield advantage of 3.13; a game at Rice Stadium would have the Owls' homefield advantage subtracted from the opponent's power rating) added to the score margin (-32, negative because the Owls lost) to yield a performance rating of 26.75. Unlike the standard Massey ratings, which represent team strength as a composite of results from the entire season, the performance rating measures only how the team performed in that individual game, so over the season a series of ratings is compiled, one for each game played. Standard statistical tests can then be used to evaluate how the team is performing over the course of the season.
Rice's second game was no improvement over the first; the 31-14 loss to Army produced a performance rating of 25.89. The loss was especially disappointing given the remainder of the Owls' schedule for the season. Looking at the opposition, there were six games one figures the Owls should be favored to win (North Texas, UTSA, Prairie View A&M, Florida Atlantic, Charlotte, and UTEP) and five where Rice is a definite underdog (Western Kentucky, Baylor, Southern Mississippi, Louisiana Tech, and Stanford). The one game that looked to be a tossup was Army, and the Owls lost it. That makes qualifying for a bowl game significantly harder. Rice can't slip against any of the lesser opponents on the schedule now, unless the Owls manage to upset one of the good teams on the schedule (and right now Massey doesn't give Rice any better than a 13% chance to win any one of those games, so it looks unlikely to happen). This week's opponent is Baylor, whose first two games against Northwestern State and Southern Methodist yielded performance ratings of 63.59 and 60.88, respectively. With those numbers, unless Rice performs significantly better, we're looking at something in the neighborhood of a 30-point loss.
I'll be travelling again, so I may not be able to update the numbers immediately, but I'll do it as soon as I can.
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