Improving NCAA Football Bowl Game Prediction
Using a Neural Network
James Kardatzke
River Valley High School
Email: james.kardatzke@rvschools.org
AbstractIn this report, we attempt to predict the results of
FBS college football bowl matches using machine learning
algorithms. We created a dataset of historical bowl games that
includes a variety of metrics for each competing team. We used
this data to create three different models: one which picks the
team with the higher Colley Rating to win each game, one using
linear regression, and another using neural networking. We
compared the performance of these models predictions with
those of sports experts. Each of these models uses binary
classification: predicting whether each match will be a win or a
loss for the home team. After training, the neural network was
the model which gave the lowest error rate (.243) on our test set.
Our error analysis focused on improving hyperparameters and
the parameters included in the dataset.
I. INTRODUCTION
At the end of every season of NCAA college football, teams
are selected to compete in around forty postseason matches.
These matches attract hundreds of millions of viewers, and
being able to predict their outcomes has importance for
journalism, coaching, and gambling. Recently, several
organizations such as FiveThirtyEight and ESPN have
attempted to predicted these matches using analytical
approaches. In our project, we will discuss prior works before
analyzing feature selection, discussing performance of various
models, and analyzing our results.
A. Related Literature
Although mainstream sports prediction has traditionally
been dominated by subjective analysis, in the past two
decades there has been a surge in quantitative analytics. For
the past several years, Nate Silvers FiveThirtyEight website
has published win probabilities for upcoming matches in a
wide array of sports, including college football. He uses an
Elo model, which computes win probabilities primarily based
on teams relative strengths [1]. While this model did give us
some insight into the importance of a team rating system, we
found that it did not work well when applied to college
football. This is likely due to the large number of teams (over
129 in 2017), and the small number of games. We had greater
success using a ranking system devised by Colley et al [2].
The Colleys Bias Free College Football Ranking Method is a
very effective tool for computing the relatives strengths of
teams with no history of competition. Finally, we were
influenced by a 2015 Stanford research paper by Chesire et al.
which used logistic regression, a Naive Bayes model, and
Support Vector Machines to attempt to predict College
Football Bowl matches [3].
Christopher Kardatzke
River Valley High School
Email: christopher.kardat@rvschools.org
II. DATASET
Our training dataset contained the results of 5 seasons (from
2011-2015) of bowl matches, and our testing dataset included
the results of 1 season (2016) of bowl matches. From 2011 to
2014, there were 35 bowl matches per season, while 2015 and
2016 both had 41 bowl matches. This allowed us to have 181
games in our training set and 41 games in our testing set. We
used a dataset of all 4746 regular season games from
2011-2016 to compute the week-by-week Colley Rankings of
each team. For each bowl game, our dataset included these
Colley Rankings (one per team per week of the regular
season), boolean values indicating whether each team was a
member of a Power Five conference, AP rankings at the time
of the game, and the winner. We obtained the weekly game
data from a cleaned ESPN dataset found on GitHub [4]. We
obtained the historical AP ranking data from the Sports
Reference website [5]. We preprocessed and compiled this
data with python.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
A. Initial Challenges
We ran into several challenges over the course of this project.
The first was difficulty obtaining game data. Although countless
websites list historical college football scores, very few had them in
formats which were conducive for use in our project. Ultimately, we
were able to find a data source with data from every game since 2011.
While this source contained many of the features we were looking for,
such as final scores and game location, it had the drawback of
containing only six years of data. A second challenge which we
encountered was variations on team names between our data sources.
For example, the game data listed the University of South Florida as
S. Florida, while the AP data listed them as USF. This led to some
confusing results at first, and we had to go back and manually alter the
datasets to match. Another issue we had was that, unlike many other
sports leagues, FBS football is not a closed-system. This means that
there are some matches between FBS and non-FBS teams. In order to
account for this, we generalized all of the non-FBS teams, and
classified them together for the purposes of Colley Rankings.
Although this doesnt completely account for potential differences in
quality between non-FBS teams, we assumed that it would not impact
our model too much, given that they are typically of a significantly
lower quality than teams in the FBS, rarely play more than one FBS
opponent a year, and do not play in bowl games.
B. Feature Selection
College football is unique from many other sports in that
teams are allowed to arrange their own non-conference
matchups. Different college football programs often take very
 Improving NCAA Football Bowl Game Prediction Using a Neural Network Page 2

different approaches to regular season match scheduling, with with over-fitting, with a training error of .01 and a test
some setting up much easier matchups than others. Due to this, error of .35. After graphing the models performance on
we didnt think it would be wise to include features which different numbers of iterations of gradient descent, as
were heavily influenced by strength of schedule, such as shown on Figure 1, we determined that 14,500 iterations
Offensive Yards per Game. We determined that features such was optimal for avoiding both over- and under-fitting.
as whether a team is home or away, Colley rankings (which
give a teams relative strength adjusted for strength of
schedule), AP rankings (which are the results of a subjective
survey of top sports journalists), and whether or not a team is a
member of a Power Five conference could provide insight.
Initially, we only used a teams Colley Ranking at the time of
the bowl game. However, we discovered that including
features for teams rankings after each week of the season
allowed the model to glean more information about a teams
season and recent performance, and provide a more accurate
prediction.

C. Models
We tried several different methods to address our
classification problem: Figure 1. Neural Networks performance with varying iterations
1) Colley Model: For a baseline for comparison, we used a
model which predicted that the team with the higher Colley
Ranking at the time of each match would win. This model had Another hyperparameter which we wanted to optimize was the
an error of .487 on the training set. This shows that solely number of nodes in our hidden layer. We tested the models
comparing two teams Colley Rankings is very ineffective, performance with between two and seven nodes and, as shown
likely due to the fact that teams are generally matched up against in Table 2, determined that three nodes was optimal.
teams with very similar rankings.
2) Expert Predictions: Another, more realistic,
Number of
comparison method which we used was a compilation of Nodes 2 3 4 5 6 7
expert predictions. We looked at bowl game predictions Test Set Error 0.269 0.243 0.293 0.319 0.293 0.293
from a number of sports websites and blogs [6, 7, 8], and
average the accuracy of these predictions. See Table 1 for Table 2. Neural Networks performance with varying nodes
more information on this model. This model had a
training set error of .382. Using these hyperparameters, the model had a training error
of .243. Figure 2 shows the confusion matrix for this model.
Bleacher USA
Expert ESPN Average
Report Today
Test Set Error 0.341 0.439 0.366 0.382 Home Win Away Win

Table 1. Expert predictions accuracy Predicted Home Win 0.341 0.122

Predicted Away Win 0.146 0.390

3) Logistic Regression: We used logistic regression to
compare the accuracy of our neural network with another Figure 2. Neural Networks confusion matrix
machine learning model. Although bowl games are at at
neutral site, a coin toss decides which team is designated IV. RESULTS
the home team. We trained our model with binary
We tested 4 different models. The test set error rates for each of
classification to predict whether or not the home team
these models can be found in Table 3.
would win. We used a sigmoid activation function. After
this model was implemented, and its hyperparameters Logistic Neural
Model Naive Experts
were tuned, the test set had a .317 error rate and a .074 Regression Network
standard error. The model regressed to the coefficients Test Set 0.487 0.382 0.317 0.243
Error
shown in Appendix 1. These coefficients show that the
most significant parameters were each of the teams AP Table 3. Performance of each of the four models
ranking. Interestingly, these coefficients also seem to
As shown, the neural network performed best by a significant
indicate that being a member of a Power Five conference
margin. the expert predictions had an error rate more than 55%
is correlated with a higher chance of winning a bowl that of the neural network. The neural network also outperformed
game. the logistic regression model, showing that
2 there
2 may be some
insight to be gained from looking at nonlinear relationships
4) Neural Network: Lastly, we implemented a neural between our variables (such as whether a teams Colley Rankings
network with one hidden layer. Initially, we problems have increased or decreased in the last few weeks of the season).
 Improving NCAA Football Bowl Game Prediction Using a Neural Network
V. CONCLUSION
Our project demonstrates that it is possible to train a neural
network to predict college football bowl matches to a
significantly higher degree of accuracy than experts subjective
analysis. Using only a handful of parameters, our model was
able to predict these game with over 75% accuracy. One of the
biggest areas of improvement for our neural network is the
quantity of data. The data source which we used only had six
seasons worth of data, which meant that we had less than 200
cases in our training set. By making a new model with a larger
dataset, we could likely improve performance. Another issue
with our model is that it doesnt evaluate potential changes
between the final week of the regular season and bowl games
(For example, in 2012 Wisconsin Badgers coach Bret Bielema
left the team during this time-span). Although radical changes
are rare, they could be accounted for by including parameters
which analyze news sentiment during this time period. These
improvements deserve further investigation, and could help the
neural network become an even more accurate model for
predicting college football bowl games.
Page 3
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to thank Professor Laura Albert for her
guidance and insight on this problem. We would also like to
thank Ben Ulmer, Matthew Fernandez, and Matt Mills
REFERENCES
[1] (2014) Introducing NFL Elo Ratings [Online] Available: https://
fivethirtyeight.com/features/introducing-nfl-elo-ratings/
[2] W. N. Colley, Colley's Bias Free College Football Ranking Method: The
Colley Matrix Explained, 2002.
[3] E. Chesire, A. Childs, T. Leung, College Football Game Predictor,
2015.
[4] NCAA Game Data. Scraped from ESPN data. [RDS files]. Available:
https://github.com/mattmills49/CFB_Analysis/tree/master/pbp_cleaning
[5] AP Poll Data. Sports Reference. [CSV file]. Available: https://
www.sports-reference.com/cfb/years/2016-polls.html
[6] (2016) "Predictions for Every 2016-17 College Football Bowl
Game" [Online]. Available: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2678675-
predictions-for-every-2016-17-college-football-bowl-game
[7] (2016) "41 College Football Games, 42 Predictions" [Online]. Available:
http://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/18202412/41-games-42-
prediction
[8] (2016) "USA Today Sports College Football Staff Picks for Every Bowl
Game" [Online]. Available: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/
2016/12/15/staff-picks-college-football-bowl-games-fiesta-bowl-orange-
bowl/95459490/
 Appendix

Away Home
Away Home Away Home
Parameter Intercept Power Power
AP AP Colley Colley
Five Five

Coefficient 0.025 -0.899 1.41 -0.631 0.139 -0.003 0.107

Appendix 1. Logistic Regression Coefficients