Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

The portal is used a lot in non rev sports too I'm noticing.  Well,not all vball programs are non-rev.

With all respect, I have to disagree with a central tenet.

Low possessions, field position are not favorite friendly. Wearing down sort of is. Even if you’re low-risk, slowing it down in fact makes it high variance.

It’s similar to a gambling expected value problem. The longer one gambles, the more likely the odds are to settle on whoever has the edge. If you’re a better poker player than me, I want to play fewer hands rather than more, because long term, I’m in trouble. It’s the same way a three-game series is higher variance than a seven game series.

What the thing you mentioned about the high variance underdog I think partially relies of the fact favorites historically played the way you said, and those quirky tactics were outliers that got the Tress teams out of comfort zones.

But if there’s a favorite comfortable with tempo, trying to track meet them just makes it likely you give up 70. Shoot, look at what Army did to Oklahoma and Michigan. The knights needed fewer breaks because the gave had literally less football. 

Understood and I agree. Perhaps I'm conflating a low-risk / low-variance strategy which emphasizes ball control and field position with necessarily reducing possessions (because you're running the ball and not stopping the clock). Reducing possessions is a higher-variance effect of a lower-variance overall strategy, if that makes sense?

So yeah, that was a bit of a mistake on my part.