Predict The 2011 Cal Football Season

We started this last year and it was very interesting and enjoyable.  We saw how fans' expectations for wins and losses started in the spring, continued into the summer, and then waxed and waned over the season.  So, we're gonna do it again this year!  It's all about expectations.

Expectations. I think if there's anything Cal fans suffer the most from, it's those damned great expectations. Most of us are busy people and don't have the time to analyze what exactly our Golden Bears are capable of--we tailgate, we go to the games, we get happy or sad or angry or drunk, we yell at the quarterback regardless, and then we go home. And then we go back to our lives and pretend we know more about football than we do thanks to the experts telling us what we should feel (economics majors might recognize this as reference-dependent preferences).

Sometimes when the expectations are promising, we go a little crazy. We think this year is our year. I call this the Rose Bowl complex, where any promising team is immediately propped up as the chosen one to relieve California fans of five decades of denial. It happened in 2009. And in 2007. And in 2006...

I've had enough of other people deciding exactly what the expectations are for this season.  Cal fans, we're going to go ahead and predict how 2011's going to go.

But there's a twist. We're not going to predict wins and losses (an absolutist and thus highly illogical way of predicting seasons). We're going to predict win probabilities. So on the form, if you believe Cal has a 100% chance of beating Presbytarian, submit a "1" on the form underneath that game. If you believe Cal has a 20% chance of beating USC, submit "0.20" there. And so forth.

Adding up all the win probabilities will give us the expected value of wins (i.e. you expect Cal to win 1.2 games in the scenario above if they play Presbytarian and USC--1+0.2); averaging out all these expected win value for all users will give us the aggregated win value, and CGB's own expected value for 2011.

So let's weigh our current expectations of this season Cal fans! Feel free to share your win probabilities game-by-game and expected win totals in the comments. Fill out the form after the jump and we'll add it all up for a later post!  Please fill out the form by 8 PM on Sunday, May 15th!  Then, we'll start compiling the info for a future post.  Yay!  GO BEARS!