Back in May of last year Bud wrote about how professional gamblers assign probabilities to each game to go about predicting the season. This is an exercise we like to run to manage expectations and show how difficult it truly is to win 10 games or more in college football, especially if a team is not favored in all of its games.
It just so happens I have a friend of mine who is a professional gambler. He has a day job, but he makes his living betting sports like a day trader plays the stock market, complete with a healthy dose of arbitrage. Every year since my freshman year of college, we've gotten together and broken down the upcoming season, and we have a method. We call it "proportional win shares". You can call it whatever you want, but I think you'll see how it's more effective than simply assigning "win" or "loss" to the games.
The idea is simple: assign a winning % to each game. For instance, you could say that FSU has an 80% chance of beating Maryland (0.80), or that they have a 20% chance to beat UF (0.20).
Now, I think it is fair to say that many around here know the drill, but Tomahawk Nation has grown drastically since last year and we want to give everyone a shot. We will conduct this exercise 3 or 4 times before the opening kickoff, so don't think you are too tied to the numbers. We just want to get a feel for how everyone is approaching the season thus far. It should be very interesting to track the changes in the optimism (or pessimism) for the team and to determine whether any change in prediction is tied to a specific event. This is your chance to show us how good or bad you think Florida State will be!
Props to editor Ricobert1 for creating this great survey (now closed, thanks to those who voted!), where you can select the chance FSU will win in each game and it will automatically fill in your proportional win shares! So read the article on proportional win shares, then take the survey! We'll unveil the results Friday!