When he was young, Kyle Langham didn’t have much of a choice of who to cheer for.
“I come from a generation of Notre Dame alumni; my mom, my grandfather,” Langham says. “I myself didn't get in, but when I was growing up, my mom made it very clear that you’re rooting for Notre Dame or you're not eating.
“So it's pretty deep in my bloodline.”
Langham did have a choice when it came to his career, though, and ultimately got into Data Science.
Now, he’s found a way to apply his skill with analytics to his passion for Notre Dame Football.
Langham has been publishing data and his own thoughts on the Irish’s chances at reaching the College Football Playoffs this year on his Twitter account (@kylelangham) and has also built an Online Dashboard tracking it week to week.
Langham has used his skills to analyze Notre Dame Football internally before, but this is the first time he’s done anything and shared it publicly.
“I just kept seeing people in the Twittersphere saying, 'Hey, 10-2 Notre Dame is definitely in, 100 percent lock, lock it in. Just got to win the last remaining games,’” Langham says. “I was like, 'I don't know, that just doesn't seem right.'
“So I started just figuring out, 'OK, well what are the odds of there being multiple ACC bids or multiple Big 12? How many is the SEC going to get in?' And that led me to be like, 'OK, I'm just going to put this out there and see how many people disagree and how many people resonate with it.'”
The Irish debuted at #10 in the first set of Playoff Rankings, which were released on Tuesday night.
However, Langham cautions Notre Dame fans against drawing too many conclusions from the initial rankings.
“We're used to if you're 10th and you win, you don't go down and maybe you go up if the team ahead of you loses,” Langham says. “The College Football Playoff Committee has on multiple times, flipped teams. Teams come out, they win by 40 points, and yet they still drop in the rankings. And it's because other teams perform well.
“I don't think you can guarantee that Texas won't jump up to the 10th spot and Notre Dame gets bumped down to the 11th spot in the following week or something like that.”
Langham uses ESPN Analytics to assign win probabilities for each game for all teams that could be relevant to the College Football Playoff discussion and uses that information to model out the likelihood of all the scenarios.
He does not try to assign any objective weight to the subjective nature of the College Football Playoff Committee.
“The data I look at is just, 'Hey, what are the chances that Team A finishes with one loss? What are the chances that Team A finishes with two losses?'” he explains.
“I don't make a value judgment beyond that of whether or not Team A with two losses; is the Committee going to pick them and not Notre Dame? That to me, I think is a lot more problematic. You never know.
“You can't predict what the Committee is going to value. Obviously it could be a hard choice with Miami versus Notre Dame this year if both teams are 10-2. How they're going to rank basically strength the schedule and head-to-head matchup and what kind of weight they'll give to whether a team won at home or is better on the road. All that kind of stuff, you can't tell.”
There is still plenty to analyze and learn even without trying to guess what the Committee would do.
Langham has seen some Irish fans believe if the Irish simply win from here on out they’re in.
“And it's like, 'No, no, no. You can still move down on the rankings.' Quality wins in November are definitely going to play a role,” he says. “Notre Dame doesn't have that many opportunities for a quality win. I'm hesitant to say that the rankings today matter a lot.”
As an Irish fan, Langham looks at it purely from a Notre Dame perspective.
“I think Notre Dame's best path forward is the ACC to get one team in, the Big 12 to get one team in, SEC gets four, maybe five, Big Ten gets three, a Group of Five gets one,” he says. “That works out real nicely for Notre Dame.”
“What I'm looking for is how do we make that happen? And so that's how I generate my list of these are the teams I'm hoping win.”
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