Legal Commentary

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December 23, 2009, Wednesday

5. Poinsettia Bowl, San Diego, CA, Utah vs. California, 8:00 pm

Utah has the nation's longest intact bowl winning streak at 8 games and its current head coach, Kyle Whittingham is 4-0. During the season, the Utes played 3 teams currently ranked in the top 15 and lost to them all (TCU, Oregon and BYU). Utah lost to Oregon by only 7, 31-24, in a game fairly even on stats, and had better stats than BYU in its season-ending loss 26-23, in overtime. Utah was soundly beaten only by TCU, and the Horned Frogs are simply the better team this year.

Cal is 5-1 in bowl games under head coach Jeff Tedford, who has done a lot for Cal football but whose teams seldom play consistently well throughout one full season. Although Cal this year beat ranked Arizona and Stanford, Cal also lost to ranked Oregon and USC and to unranked Oregon State and Washington, ignominiously losing in their final regular season game 42-10 to a Huskies team it beat last year 48-7. The Cal loss was a tremendous finish for first year head coach Steve Sarkisian, as Washington went 5-7 this year as compared to 0-12 the past season, but it once again brought to light the Golden Bears inconsistent play under Tedford tutelage. Injured tailback Jahvid Best will not play in the bowl game - according to this report.

Our call: YPPSYS ranks Utah 26th with a rating of -0.2 and California 38th with a rating of -0.7, so that the .5 rating difference x 9 means 4.5 points on the scoreboard in favor of Utah. The schedule adjusted margin of victory gives Utah a rating of 5.3 and Cal a rating of 2.1, i.e. a field goal advantage to the Utes. The opening line had Cal as 2.5 point favorites and that is now up to 4 points. Even if we give Cal a bit of a home field advantage because this game is in California, we still call it 31-30 for Utah.

NCAA FBS College Football Bowl Game Predictions 2009 / 2010 utilize YPPSYS ratings and rankings (yards per play advantage - offense and defense, won-loss record, schedule of difficulty according to Massey Ratings) and YPPSYS II for the top 40 teams (YPPSYS II = YPPSYS I supplemented by MOV, margin of victory plus the schedule difficulty recalculated based on YPPSYS ratings).

YPPSYS COLLEGE FOOTBALL RATINGS AND RANKINGS - NCAA DIVISION I-A (FBS) are based on net yards per play advantage (NAYPPA), strength of schedule, defense and adjustment for losses through December 5, 2009, after Week 14 of regular season games.

NAYPPA = net yards per play advantage (YPP OFF minus YPP DEF)
YPP OFF = net yards per play gained on offense
YPP DEF = net yards per play allowed on defense
Schedule = Schedule difficulty thus far in the season according to Massey Ratings
(SchP=Schedule Partial)
YPP Team Statistics are based on data found at cfbstats.com
Odds are taken from Todd Beck's College Football Prediction Tracker
as of Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:42:07 AM

The prognostications cover numerous bowl games and great match-ups. Few games can be said to be mis-matched and ultimate winners are in doubt in many.

Full post as published by LawPundit on December 17, 2009 (boomark / email).