Coming soon: Kenny Chesney, Football, and Spreadsheet Mathematics

Get ready to hear this at a football stadium near you soon. A lot!

“Knocking heads and talking trash. It’s slinging mud and dirt and grass.”

That’s from Kenny Chesney’s ballad, The Boy’s of Fall. This song from his excellent Hemingway’s Whiskey album has been off the charts and all but silenced on radio airwaves for almost a year. But it will be back on the Public Address systems of stadiums from the NFL to Middle School in the coming weeks.

You may even see the school’s dance teams try to bust a few moves during  this tune.

“You mess with one man, you’ve got us all!”

In the meantime, since neither you nor I are doing the singing, dancing, nor ballplaying, is there a way we can garner a little attention from our fellow fans during the game?

Thanks to years of numbers crunching by math-minded fans of American Rules football, we can form a strong opinion about any game on any level, if we have four numbers, accumulated by your teams so far this season. Also, jot down how many games each team has played.

Prior to heading to the stadium, check the league Website, school athletics pages, or the local paper for these numbers. You’re looking for your team’s total points scored and their total offensive yards. If available, also get their defensive points allowed, and the defensive yards allowed. If these numbers aren’t available, then you will have to substitute the corresponding offensive numbers from the opposing team.

Now get your favorite spreadsheet software, and you will soon have a learned opinion of the upcoming game even if you’ve never seen the teams before! We’ll apply some Yards-per-Point analysis formulas to the totals that have been honed during the past three decades.

Let’s make our favorite team the Wolves, and the opposing team the Bulls.

Start putting some numbers in your spreadsheet program cells.

We’ll give the Wolves these numbers for their season so far: 3,845 offensive yards, 5,022 defensive yards allowed, 186 offensive points, and 328 defensive points allowed. For the Bulls, we’ll do 5,106 offensive yards, 5,028 defensive yards, 383 offensive points and 278 defensive points allowed.

 Add the Wolves’ offensive yards to the Bulls’ defensive yards allowed (3,844+5,028=8,872). Then add the Wolves’ points scored to the Bulls’ points allowed (186+278=464).

Now do this for the Bulls. First add the yards (5,106+5,022=10,128) and points (383+377=760).

It’s not looking great for our team. Is it?

In your favorite spreadsheet program, place the numbers in cells, and then run a few formulas on them.

First, we want to get what I call a Yards-per-Point Factor  for each team. For the Wolves, divide the yards by the points, delivering a factor of 19.12. Do the same for the Bulls, and you’ll get a factor of 13.33. I have my spreadsheet software round the numbers to two decimals. You don’t need to round if you don’t want to.

Then we compute average yards for each team by taking the same yards numbers, but dividing them by games played so far this season. In this case, let’s make them pro teams, and have them on their Game 16. So divide the Wolves and Bulls yardage by 30 (15 games each) and get 295.75 for the Wolves and 337.6 for the Bulls.

With that done, we finish. Divide each team’s Yards Factor by the Yards-per –Point Factor – round that number to a whole number if you wish – to get a projected score.  I project that the Bulls beat my Wolves team by 10, something like 26-16.

The projected score almost never will occur in real life. Neither will running these numbers on a spreadsheet make us Vegas-class handicappers (Please see note from a Real Life Sports Handicapper at the end of this post).  Not taken into account with this system are field conditions, weather, injuries, and a Pandora’s Box of other factors that professional scouts and prognosticators all gather, with great effort, on a daily basis.

But once these numbers and the related formulas are put into my spreadsheet, I can gather those several totals, and make an educated projection of the game. When others ask, I tell them, “My Yards-per-Point analysis says the Bulls win by 10.”

I don’t include the score, because that actually matches only rarely.

So even if you’re not familiar with the teams, or maybe even the sport, get those totals and dazzle your friends with your powers of analysis this season. And remember what blog got you started.

His great football song is no longer on the charts, but remember when you hear Kenny Chesney sing it on your stadium PA system:

 “I’ve got your number, got your back when your back’s against the wall.”


SPECIAL NOTE FROM A REAL-LIFE SPORTS HANDICAPPER:


This post is an official entry in the ScottsPicks.com Sports Writing Contest. Anyone can enter if you can tie it to sports in some way - and if a country music blog can write about football handicapping kind of like they do at Scotts Picks then you, too, can enter today!