Your posts have been fine, and respectful, and raise the impression that others have of Marshall. I think he just confused you with someone else. Thanks for participating in the discussion.

our average margin of victory over the last 9 games at home is like 40. -20 is pretty low.

Considering that Ohio is likely to be bowl-eligible this year, that isn't very useful data because it includes things like wins over bad teams, and FCS teams. What is their record at home against bowl-eligible teams or FBS teams with a winning record?

Over the last three years, Marshall is 3-4 at home against such teams:
2013 ECU 59-28 win
2013 UTSA 34-10 win (winning record, but not eligible for bowl)
2012 UCF 17-54 loss
2012 Tulsa 38-45 loss
2012 Ohio 24-27 loss
2011 S.Miss 26-20 win
2011 V. Tech 10-30 loss
Average score 29.7 to 30.6

Here's a look at Marshall's scoring vs Ohio as compared to other teams on their schedule. Notice that Ohio's defense has held Marshall's offense to significantly less points than their season's average for the last 3 years, and even in the years when Marshall won their point totals were next to lowest of any of their other wins. I'm confident Ohio's defense will continue this trend on Saturday, it will be up to Ohio's offense to score enough to get the W.

2013
61 W
59 W
56 W
55 W
52 W
49 L
48 W
45 W
34 W
31 W
31 L OHIO
24 W
24 L
21 L

2012
59 L
59 W
54 W
52 W
44 W
41 L
38 W
38 L
34 L
31 L
24 L OHIO
17 L

2011
59 W
34 W
28 L
26 W
24 W
23 W
20 W
17 W
17 L
13 L
10 L
07 L OHIO
06 L

2010
38 W
31 W
28 W
28 L
24 W OHIO
21 L
17 L
16 W
16 L
14 L
10 L
07 L

2009
34 W
31 W
31 W
27 W
27 W
21 W OHIO
21 L
20 L
20 L
17 W
17 L
10 L
07 L

Terd fans getting testy and it's only Wednesday. Must be getting nervous. Tic Toc. LOL

I just gave the raw data. It's up to you (and others) to interpret it. I think it is certainly more relevant than the data you gave. The data you gave was "our average margin of victory over the last 9 games at home is like 40". As Delete Pending pointed out, your data was wrong, and the actual number for the last 9 games is 32. What he didn't mention is that if you go back to 10 games, 11 games, or 12 games, the "average margin of victory" keeps going down, because 10, 11, and 12 were all losses. Thus, starting at "9 games" is a pretty arbitrary point, isn't it?

Even then, if you accept your arbitrary point in the middle of 2102 as the starting point, and move to the actual data, you find that your 9 game dataset includes wins against FCS Rhode Island, FCS Gardner-Webb, a Miami team that ended up 0-12, a Southern Miss team that finished 1-11, and a UAB team that finished 2-10, so more than half of your 9 games were against horrible teams. By specifically including these in your comparison example from which you are projecting the score for Ohio-Marshall, you are implicitly saying that you think Ohio is no better than these teams. I think you are wrong, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.


Of course everyone has bad teams they play at home. What does that have to do with the point we are talking about? The question is, if you want to project how Marshall might do against Ohio from past games, which is more "skewed", using as a comparison point games against Rhode Island and Gardner-Webb, or using as a comparison point only games against other bowl eligible teams?

By the way, if you asked the same question about Ohio, here are the home games Ohio has had against bowl-eligible teams in the same time period:
2013 CMU 23-26 loss
2013 Marshall 34-31 win
2013 NTSU 27-21 win
2012 Bowling Green 14-26 loss
2011 Marshall 44-7 win
2011 Ball State 20-23 loss
2011 Temple 35-31 win
Ohio is 4-7, not significantly different from Marshall. I think that's pretty normal. The idea is that at home you want to win a little better than half of the games against good competition, and all the games against bad competition.

I was just trying to show the disparity between "like 40" and the actual number. Eight points a game is a lot. Especially to Las Vegas.

But they have been quite impressive at home since Ohio went in to the Joan and beat them two years ago.

Corrected that for you! :-)

I pointed out the bowl eligible teams from a year ago like you wanted to do so quit with your hand waving.

Our average margin of victory over bowl eligible teams a year ago was 27.5, nearly 4 TDs.

Good luck this weekend, your going to need it.

Thank-you professor, The Herd are ready for it's best game of the year. We win 0-45 so your in trouble. There ready to play.

Thanks. I was trying to keep as much of the original as possible, so I only corrected factual information. Team editing. It's a BA varsity sport! :-)

http://youtu.be/5hfYJsQAhl0