The Winning Streak

[901 Orange]

Uhh how many door mats did clemson wipe their feet on over the last 29 games.??

 

[CrybabyVol]

I've seen a few folks on these forums pooh-pooh our 6-game winning streak. "Not great teams," they'd say, "not big challenges," or, "we barely won some of the games," things like that.

Well, let's just think about what goes into a winning streak, purely from a probability perspective.

What if every team we played was a near-peer, a rough equal? Well, that would mean a roughly 50/50 chance of winning each game. So we can calculate the odds we'd win 6 in a row. It is simply:

50% * 50% * 50% * 50% * 50% * 50% == .5 * .5 * .5 * .5 * .5 * .5 == .015625 == about 1.5%.

That's it, a less than 2% chance we get to where we are today.

But wait, the naysayers say, some of those weren't peer competition! Vandy wasn't peer competition! UAB wasn't either!

Okay, fair enough. Let's divide those six games into three groups: hugely favored (90% chance we win), slightly favored (60% chance), and slightly underdog (40% chance). We'll say that UAB and Vandy were 90% games ... that USCe (though we didn't know it then) and Kentucky were slightly favored for us (60%) ... and that we were slight underdogs for Mizzou and Indiana (40%).

GIven all that, our chance of running the back half of the schedule as we did was:

.60 * .90 * .60 * .40 * .90 * .40 == .046656 == a less than 5% chance we'd win out.

We can fiddle with the numbers some more, but it's always gonna come out in this general range: 2% to 5% chance of doing what our lads did. Accomplishing what they accomplished.

That's huge.

Lot to be proud of. Don't let the naysayers tell us any different.

Go Vols!

Ehhh, blast me. Call me a troll. Whatever. CJP has not done anything I'm "proud" of. Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida are decimated next year. We are not. There is absolutely no excuse to not be in competition for the east in November. I've said again, again, and again. We will know everything in one year.

 

[VFL-82-JP]

Ehhh, blast me. Call me a troll. Whatever. CJP has not done anything I'm "proud" of.....

Yeah, but you're a crybaby (and very likely a troll from another team). So we take that into account when we read your viewpoints.


Oh, and p.s. @goldvol, here's another one. Don't even have to leave the thread to find 'em. Heh.