Offense

Formula Items

Offense, Defense. Passing and Rushing make up the brunt of your MrCFB prediction formula. Think of the relationship between these factors as a sort of joystick for making your predictions. If the four directions were as follows:

Offense

Rushing + Passing

Defense

Then by increasing Offense, you would obviously decrease Defense and vise-versa. The same goes for Rushing and Passing. Now in MrCFB Offense + Defense must equal 100 so setting Offense to 60 will result in Defense being set to 40. Setting Offense to 30 would result in Defense being set to 70 etc. The same goes for Rushing + Passing , they must equal 100 and increasing one decreases the other.

So how does this affect the prediction? Well if a team that has a great run defense is playing a team with a great passing offense you should be able to figure how adjusting the numbers will affect the prediction. In the past, some strong formulas have been made using a wide variety of settings the thing to look for when making formulas is consistency. You don't want the formula predicting scores of 63 - 2 for every game, while it may get lucky and win a week or two, it's not giving you any insight into the game.

Minimum differential
This is the Minimum differential that you want MrCFB to consider a "play".
If, for example, MrCFB (using your formula) predicts a score of Green Bay 21 - Jets 6 (a difference of 15 points) and the line on the game was GB - 12, then MrCFB would consider this game a play if the Min. Diff. was 2 but not if it was 3 or more.

Maximum differential
This is the Maximum differential that you want MrCFB to consider a "play". If, for example, MrCFB (using your formula) predicts a score of Green Bay 21 - Jets 6 (a difference of 15 points) and the line on the game was GB - 3, then MrCFB would consider this game a play if the Max. Diff. was 13 or more but not if it was 12 or less. The tendency for most people is to set this at 99 and forget about it, but this is not usually a very smart move. If there is a very large differential in what MrCFB predicts and the actual line, there is usually a good reason for it. MrCFB has no knowledge of injuries, weather, personnel changes etc. so a big difference here should send up a red flag to you that you need to enter this information in the other factors screen. It should not just be labeled a play for you to bet on.

HFA - Home Field Advantage
This is where you enter the Home field advantage. This is generally thought of to be 2.5 - 4.5 points.

Turnovers
This is a rating on how you want MrCFB to interpret turnovers (Interceptions and Fumbles). A rating of 10 or more and MrCFB will consider turnovers to be very important, a rating of 0 and MrCFB will not use turnovers in its predictions. This originally had a limit of 9 but that limit was raised to 50 because some users have gotten very good results at higher turnover rates. I would be cautious with using too high a number here because while turnovers have a strong correlation to the outcome of the game, it is not as consistent as other stats. For example, if a team has a great Passing offense and plays a team with a poor passing defense, you can be pretty sure they will put up some big numbers. On the other hand, if you have a team that turned the ball over 6 times in each of the last 2 games and they play a team that has recovered 3-4 turnovers in the last couple games, it doesn't always follow that they get 5 turnovers in the game. There is a better chance of this happening if the turnovers were interceptions than if they were fumbles (in the previous games) but it's something you should be cautious with. I generally keep this at 10 or under.

Multiplier
This formula variable was originally installed for the Over/Under player but has proved to be very valuable for predicting sides too. What it does is take the predicted score and multiply it by this number. So if MrCFB predicts a score of Giants 20 - Saints 10 and you set the multiplier to 1.5 then the predicted score will be changed to (20 x 1.5) 30 - 15 (10 x1.5).

What difference does that make? Well if the line was Giants - 11 it will change it from a non-play to a play. If you tend to favor formulas with high Rushing / Defense numbers you'll probably want this set above 1 to bring the predicted scores up to "real" values. Likewise if you tend to set Passing and Offense high, this will probably be set under 1. Ranges are usually in the .8 to 1.2 range.