*** Official Michigan Football 2007 Thread ***

[MyTurn2Raise]

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Your math is flawed for one huge reason....the big favorites call off the dogs.....L'Ville is 79 points better, but layed off. This would account for the stat difference.

This is the biggest upset in history

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And the big favorites don't call off the dogs against bad 1-A opponents too? Personally I would prefer the ranking system that actually predicts results over the one that says how much better a team hypothetically is. I'm not trying to use my numbers as evidence of how good Appalachian State is or isn't, I'm staying out of that argument. What I am looking at is the question of what a fair spread would have been, in order to determine how big of an upset this really was. If 1-A teams CONSISTENTLY "call of the dogs" to the tune of underperforming their "true" edge by an average of 21 points, then that should be factored into the line. I have no doubt the talent gap is large enough that Michigan could have won by 41 on average if they played their best for all four quarters, but in any normal version of this matchup they would reign it in, and not end up winning by that much. Therefore 38-40 would not have been a reasonable spread, since the margin would be less than that well more than 50% of the time. 30-32 is the highest spread that I think would have been reasonable for this game, and since that is less than the 35.5 that has happened in the past, I think there is a decent argument to be made that it isn't THE biggest upset ever. Not that it isn't close [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Would you consider it the biggest upset of all time if it had been Utah State instead of Appalachian State? It's valid to say yes, I probably would, but I'm curious.

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yeah...the talent gap according to steele was 38 points, but that is only one set of his rankings. I'm sure the final power poll (which he didn't release this year) would've had teh gap as smaller as App St clearly maximizes their potential while Michigan, as rated by Steele, merely plays to theirs. IIRC, the spread was 32 or 32.5 when I saw it at 5dimes college xtra. I didn't take note of it though and didn't write it down.

so, not the biggest spread to overcome

but, I have to think the distribution of outcomes, Michigan's 'name,' the spotlight, the numerous swings late, 100k opposing fans, etc makes it the biggest

I mean, W Mich-C Mich just doesn't measure up to all that