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College Crosse Presents: The Division I Lacrosse Game Picker

Have you ever wanted to know the projected goal spread of Wagner-Wagner on a neutral field? Well, buddy, your day is officially made.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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.
If you're curious, here are the details on today's games:
DIVISION I LACROSSE GAME PICKER PICKS: 4/29/2016
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