Cougaracity: The Pulse of Cougar Nation: Game-by-Game Odds

(Photo by Jon Hardy/BYU)

Sometimes BYU fans get a reputation for being irrational or having unrealistic expectations.

Maybe some of us get caught up in the offseason hype. Maybe some of us thought BYU was going to go undefeated in 2011. And maybe some of us still think BYU definitely would have gone undefeated last year if Riley Nelson had been the QB from the beginning (don't be that guy, please).

While many of us have been known to get fooled by coaches' quotes, anonymous sources, and bogus conference realignment rumors, we're not all bad, right?

But let's see how unrealistic BYU fans' 2012 win-loss expectations really are, shall we?

One of the questions from the survey asked participants to assign a percentage of likelihood (odds) of a win for each game. The survey results for each game can be found at the end of this blog entry, but we calculated the average odds (based off survey results) and listed them below.

As you can see, BYU fans don't really feel like there is a team on the schedule that BYU definitely can't beat. (Also, BYU fans feel Weber St. has a better chance of beating us than Idaho. Ouch.) The opponent with the lowest odds is Notre Dame, but 44.68 percent odds is hardly devastating. Personally, I think the Georgia Tech game is scarier, since the team will have to travel TO Georgia just week after having to travel TO Indiana.

After calculating the average odds, we simulated the 2012 season 200 times to come up with these projections:

First off, the reason there is no information for less than 6 wins is because with the win probabilities provided for each game, there is no chance BYU would win less than 6 games.

Overall, the results are pretty good and pretty much what I think fans expected. The fans I talk to pretty much feel the range for 2012 wins is about 8 - 10, and as you can see from the chart above, that's seems to be about right, since about 70 percent of the seasons had that finish.

Other interesting notes about the season simulation:

The median and average finish for BYU is 9-3
BYU has a 62.5 percent chance of winning 9 or more regular season games
BYU is about three times less likely to go undefeated then they are to win only 6 games (Good news: neither is very likely)

So I think BYU fans, as a whole, are pretty realistic, but when you look at some of the individual survey answers (see below), it is quite clear not everyone has a better-than-Charlie-Sheen sense of reality:

*** Disregard any different colored lines on the tables below. They mean absolutely nothing.