Statistically Speaking: Utah at USC

The University of Utah's year of downs took a grim and tragic turn just a few hours after one of the first good events of the season. There's no algorithm for grief and loss, no way to know if the team comes together the way they've been talking about trying to do, or simply can't focus after all the sleepless nights and foggy days that define the time after a terrible event like what happened to Aaron Lowe and the Utes.

Predicting the performance of a football team requires appreciating the depth and complexity of the system. Every play has twenty-two moving parts, and even if everything else goes perfectly, the slightest slip can cause a player to miss their assignment, spiraling into a destroyed play—or that exact same slip can have no effect at all since the opposing player didn't have an assignment that exploited the mistake—or, more often than you might expect, the mistake leads to a big success (imagine a wide receiver running a go route when he was supposed to run a curl, but breaking wide open and collecting a long TD catch).

Factoring emotion into that is next to impossible. A player may be extra-motivated one moment and despondent the next. That moment could come on a critical play, or it could matter not at all. In the end, the important thing to do for the team is to support them even if they fail. The important thing for an analyst is to know the limits of the science and leave the alchemy of emotion to different sorts of experts.

Utah isn't favored in this one, with the key difference being the home field advantage of the Trojans. USC's home field advantage is something Utah hasn't been able to overcome since 1916, when they beat them 27-12. It would be a remarkable feat if they did, and put a bright spotlight on next week's matchup against the Sun Devils.

I'm picking Utah to win this game. The numbers don't say they will, but I love these guys and my heart aches for them and I'm not going to pick against them this week—algorithms be damned. This group of young men is going to rise up through the adversity and put things in place for an epic showdown against the Sun Devils on October 16.

Utah 32, USC 30