Welcome back to football! The powers that be finally decided to get with the program and just officially call these early games “Week Zero,” so we shall as well. There are a couple of really cool FCS games on this week, but alas there are no spreads released for them as of now: Incarnate Word @ Nicholls and Davis @ Mercer could be barn burners, both for the same reason: Defensive-minded home teams against some FCS’s best offenses.
Week Zero doesn’t give us a lot of decent watches in the Bowl Division, though Farmageddon live from Eire does look promising. So, with just a handful of games this week, we’ll just have to choose one as a Game of the Week.
But first, let’s do a postmortem on last year’s numbers after picking ATS for every game: I covered these previously on the other site, so I’ll just copy and paste them here:
66.87% correct, with a +0.691 spread bias (modeling overestimated covering by 3/4th of a point) and 1.12 O/U bias (modeling overshot the totals by about a point.)
That was an improvement over the very weird 2023 season, which finished at 63.84%, with an underestimation bias of -.35 and a negative totals biasing of -72.
What was the reason for the uptick in covers?
I think last year we finally had some sort of certainty with the NIL era rosters. 2023 was really the first year of the mass exodus folks. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of transfers, but there was marginally more roster continuity especially among upperclassman who can make more in college as a starter than being an UDFA.
I think another reason is that quarterback play was not quite so disparate last year: It was a down year for elite arms, with fairly average play being the norm at most schools. This season should be somewhat improved, but I think the true breakout is going to happen next year — all of those freshmen who signed under revenue sharing, and with steady rosters and a full year in systems, I think will improve QB play as well.
It was also a year for elite defense: OSU, Penn State, ND, UGA, Texas all finished inside the top 10, and all were playoff teams. But across the country scoring was down, defensive play was up, drive completion was down, turnovers were up. We’ve discussed this before, but those things are related.
And then you see the true bottom line: all these factors emerge in the biasing towards more points being predicted than actually were. (1.12 totals).
TL/DR: We got back to a much better record than the off-year of 2023, where the country was frankly a hot mess, and as quarterback play is increasingly mediocre and defenses haven caught up with (and overtaken) offenses, the days of the shootout are all-but done.
With that said, let’s see how to spend that money wisely this week, shall we?
The schedules aren’t very enticing but there is one game on here that looks very promising for you degenerates (at least based on returning production). Preseason modeling is always weird — you’d prefer to have at least two full games from everyone across the country. But we’ve tended to do pretty well with adjusted modeling from prior seasons + production analysis:
Idaho State @ UNLV -25.5:
Losing Barry Odom to Purdue and picking up Dan Mullen may actually have been an upgrade, particularly in a conference that loves to pass. But, it won’t be the passing game that covers this game. The Runnin’ Rebels lost a lot of last year’s group that flirted with the Top 25 all season, but they do return the heart of their offensive line, and bring back the Mountain West’s Player of the Year favorite in the backfield: Jai’Den Thomas.
The Idaho State Bengals are the poorest of little brothers to the actual quality teams in Potato Country: the Vandals and the gimmicky former truck driving school. They’re bad even for an FCS team, especially on the ground: the third worst rushing defense in FCS, allowing over 225 yards per game, and a stupid-bad 7 yards per carry. Hitting the road against a very physical squad that returns the MWC’s best rushing attack is not a propitious start to the year for ISU.
Nor is it a very good matchup in the back seven, where the Bengals were the 7th worst team in missed tackles. Dan Mullen is a bit of a clown, but that dude puts players in space (especially out of the backfield), and then dares you to make tackles in the open field. It’s an awfully tough ask when you’re already outschemed and outgunned in the athlete department, then you get circles ran around you on the sidelines.
This is going to be a hellacious mismatch, one where Mullen lets the passing game get some live snaps in and wrinkles ironed-out before a brutal MWC campaign kicks off. Why? Because he still hasn’t told anyone who’s starting or how the QBs will be used or whether the Rebs will be a multi-QB team. In other words, it’s still an open competition possibly, and we’re going to see late throws. It’s also a game where the Runnin’ Rebel ground attack will be able to tee off at will. The only question here is a rebuilt UNLV defense, but Odom left talent despite the Rebels many departures.
It’s a big number for a historically crappy team, but the home team has the athletes, momentum, a far better sideline, and a coach who was exiled in disgrace who has to prove that he still has it. Bullying a terrible FCS squad may not prove the latter, but it will at least make Vegas boosters happy.
Best of luck, and we’ll see you next week! (PS: I have so many script-killers installed on my browser and laptop, that I sometimes have to guess if elements are showing up. Would someone let me know in the comments whether an intelligible poll is showing up below? TYVM)
Want some more of these? I crank the data for (almost) every single game, every single week over at my companion site: (Almost) Giving Away Money. Check it out, and prosper.
Still just five bucks a month.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
