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I was bored this afternoon and decided to create an interactive lacrosse game picker. This is not something that reasonably sane people do during their lunch break, but I am a licensed sociopath and, therefore, this thing happened. I apologize for nothing. NOTHING!
Anyway, this thing is pretty straightfoward: You enter the names of two teams, one as the home team and the other as away, and dictate whether the game is a neutral site affair (if it's a neutral site game it does not matter which team is labeled as home or away). As I threw this together quick you're stuck using a downloadable Excel deal, but really, four seconds of half-assed effort isn't too much to pay to have your expectations set to something other than "Verified Idiot."
DOWNLOAD THE DIVISION I LACROSSE GAME PICKER HERE
If you care about the boring details of how this works:
- I utilized a Simple Rankings Systems approach to the model. If you want to learn more about SRS, this is probably your avenue to genius. There are a million different models to use, but this was an easy thing to throw together that gives reasonably predictive responses. I put some restrictions on the SRS calculation to mute royal massacres, but did not go into weighting recent games. That's probably something to consider in the future. Don't @ me.
- This is updated through games played on April 27, 2016 and only includes games between Division I teams. This will be updated regularly-ish.
- Just use the drop down menus that are highlighted in the yellow cells.
- This is not perfect and will likely go through a few permutations, but it does the trick right now.
- There's a little bit of clean up to be done, but this is basically the heat.
Win % | Spread | Designation | |
Navy | 67.50% | -1.5 | Favorite |
Army | 32.50% | +1.5 | Underdog |
Syracuse | 56.21% | -0.5 | Toss-Up |
North Carolina | 43.79% | +0.5 | Toss-Up |
Loyola | 60.15% | -0.8 | Toss-Up |
Bucknell | 39.85% | +0.8 | Toss-Up |
Notre Dame | 53.52% | -0.3 | Toss-Up |
Duke | 46.48% | +0.3 | Toss-Up |
Drexel | 45.48% | +0.4 | Toss-Up |
Massachusetts | 54.52% | -0.4 | Toss-Up |
Delaware | 33.16% | +1.4 | Underdog |
Fairfield | 66.84% | -1.4 | Favorite |