It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over

Football, especially college football, was a big part of my childhood. Sunday night football was the wrap-up to my weekend. Holidays spent with my family always consisted of watching and playing some form of football.

My grandpa was a high school football coach for 40 years. My favorite part about watching games with my grandpa was not only that I learned something new every time, but that he had a little phrase for everything. “X player (Janikowski) is automatic”. “It’s better to be lucky than good”. But perhaps the one I understood least as a kid: “it ain’t over ’til it’s over”, or, alternatively, regardless of how much time was actually left, “there’s a lot of game left”.

That last one is the one I want to talk about. It’s the reason I smile when I see “99.9%” on any win probability graph.

Last night, I went to the Duke-SMU game in Durham, NC. I’m writing this blog on the airplane back home. A quick summary of the game if you (hopefully, since it was a sloppy, sloppy game) didn’t watch it: SMU won in overtime despite a -6 turnover differential. SMU turned the ball over six times (and fumbled it while recovering it themselves three more times!). Duke, despite committing zero turnovers themselves, scored zero points directly off any of SMU’s turnovers. It was truly a sickos special.

As a visiting fan, especially for the first time at a particular school, you never really know for sure what experience you’re going to get. Fortunately, in this case, I had an excellent time, and want to give a special shoutout to (the vast majority of) those who were in section 7, y’all were a blast.

The motivation for this blog, though, aside from remembering one of my favorite quotes from my grandpa, is one particular fan in section 7. You see, this particular fan declared the game over three (3!) different times! Come on man, it ain’t over ’til it’s over!

I wish I remembered which specific game my grandpa first said this quote to me. Because, sure enough, the team that six-or-so-year old me thought would inevitably win did not, in fact, win the ballgame. This is what I mean when I said I learned something every time I watched football with my grandpa!

Ok, back to last night: here are the three plays before or after which my fellow fan “guaranteed” Duke’s victory (note: this data coming from collegefootballdata’s win probability model)

Now, talking about the finer points of the data source’s win probability model may be fodder for a later blog (especially considering that a Duke 30yd field goal attempt with :03 remaining in a tied game is giving SMU a 22% chance of winning). But the point that I am trying to make is: look how much probability is still here on the tails!

College football is an especially unpredictable game and illustrates the “you never know what is going to happen” principle quite well. This is just another way to express what my grandpa was saying. Just because you think it’s over doesn’t mean that it is! Crazier things have probably happened. Confidence will come back to bite you sometimes.

Love you and miss you, Grampy.