Today marks the 12th time that LSU has played Alabama since Nick Saban took over as head coach, only winning 3 out of the past 12 matchups with 7 losses in a row. Over these 11 games, Alabama scored an average of 7.75 more points per game than LSU, with a victory margin of 11.78 points in the 9 wins against LSU.
I went back and looked at the rankings of each team in these games, found on these team/year pages from ESPN, (It really didn’t take but 10 min to tabulate), to see if there were any interesting trends. In only four of the 12 games, LSU was ranked better than Alabama, with LSU winning the first two and losing the second two outings. On average, Alabama has been ranked 5.25 spots higher than LSU.
Below is a plot of the Alabama – LSU point differentials as a function of the rank differentials, where each black point represents a game played against Saban. If Alabama won, the point differential is positive and if they had a higher ranking, the rank differential is negative. For example, this year Alabama is ranked #1 and LSU is ranked #4 so the rank differential is 1-4=-3. Last year this differential was -17, the biggest differential since Saban took over. The three large triangles represent the three overtime games and the purple dot is the predicted point differential for this week’s game.
The two black lines here mark 0’s so that points to the right of the vertical line indicate that LSU was ranked higher, while points below the horizontal line indicate a victory for LSU. I fit a linear regression model to these data points to predict the point differential of today’s game based on the rank differential and this model estimates that Alabama will win by 6.71 points. The regression line is plotted above in purple and has intercept 5.32 and slope -.46.
For lagniappe, I fit a logistic regression model for the rank data to get an estimated probability of victory for LSU. ESPN says that LSU has a 21.6 % chance of winning, while the usual logistic regression model on the rank data gives LSU a 23.56 % chance of winning. Last year this same logistic regression model gave them a 1.2% chance of victory, so things are looking up!
Geaux Tigers!!
If you enjoyed this post, check out some of my other posts!
-Andrew G. Chapple
Keywords: Nick Saban vs LSU, Best SEC Teams, Alabama vs LSU, LSU vs Alabama, SEC Football History, College Football History, Les Miles Record, Nick Saban Record, Nick Saban record vs LSU
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