Unlikeliest CFB win of the year? LSU-Florida game produced incredible stat
Football fans who follow advanced stats and metrics, and bettors, are familiar with Bill Connelly’s work. Connelly, known for his SP+ predictive metric, also calculates “postgame win expectancy.” LSU’s upset of Florida produced an incredible postgame win expectancy of 0.6 percent.
Per Connelly, “[Postgame win expectancy] is intended to say ‘Given your success rates, big plays, field position components, turnovers, etc., you could have expected to win this game X% of the time.’ It has nothing to do with pre-game projections or opponent adjustments.”
As you might expect, 0.6 is the lowest postgame-win expectancy for a 2020 victor.
Connelly humorously poured some salt in the wounds of Gator fans.
“The data almost literally saying ‘Man, to lose that they’d have to blow a bunch of scoring chances, suffer the dumbest/most creative personal foul ever at the worst possible time, and watch the opponent make a bomb of a FG in fog or something'” Connelly tweeted.
We should all have known that LSU and Florida plus 2020 would equate to one of the wildest games of the season.
Finally got the data run, and guhhhhhhhhhh.
LSU’s postgame win expectancy vs. Florida: 0.6%. Lowest for a winning team all year.
— Bill Connelly (@ESPN_BillC) December 13, 2020