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Win Totals, Probabilities, Percentages, Oh My!

Are the Vols more likely to miss a bowl game again this year, barely squeak in with 6 wins, stroll comfortably in with 7, or roar in forcefully with 8 or more?

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Vegas has UT's win total set at 5.5
Vegas has UT's win total set at 5.5
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

Who said message boards were a waste of time?  Sometimes they provide you with just the answer you're looking for.  Here is what I was looking for: I wanted to be able to go through UT's schedule, assign a likelihood of winning to each individual game -- for example, I'm 99% sure we'll beat Chattanooga, and slightly less sure that we'll beat Alabama -- and then, with these numbers in hand, find a way to figure out the corresponding percentages for achieving certain win totals (i.e., given my numbers, what are the chances that we win 7 games?  8 games?  etc.)

I knew this could be done, but I didn't know how to do it.  And like a previous instance when I wanted to know how to do some sports-related numbers crunching, I wasn't bashful about asking, and it turned that out somebody over at 8thmaxim.com did know how to do it, and the end result is that we now have a fancy schmancy online calculator to do the heavy lifting for us.  WooHoo!  Let's make like cool kids and play with our calculators. Here is your assignment:

1)  Go through the 2014 football schedule and assign a likelihood of winning to each game.1

2)  Click on THIS LINK.  Type in 12 (for 12 regular season games).  Hit enter.

3)  Type your percentages from step 1 into the boxes (e.g., for 50%, type .50).  Hit enter.

4)  Copy and paste your results into the comments.

5)  ???

6)  Profit!

Underpants_gnomes_medium


Vol Miscellany

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1. If you don't think in terms of probabilities, then just predict a final score for each game, and use the below table for your probabilities.

Margin Of Victory %
3 .57
7 .72
10 .78
14 .84
17 .87
21 .91
28 .95