(Football) chaos everywhere except the coasts
Plus a Week 7 preview
A wild week of college football upsets did not reach the Atlantic Coast (well, Berkeley), as Miami stormed1 back from 25 points down to squeeze past Cal2. While the rest of the college football landscape seems topsy-turvy, the ACC race is starting to take shape. Today, I walk through the model’s thinking, noting why it’s heavily favoring a few teams and sleeping on others.
Monte vs Mo
The Model
With eight conference games last week, we saw the most movement in the standings — and the model’s projections of who’ll win the ACC. The model is elevating three teams, projecting that Clemson, SMU or Miami will win the conference 79% of the time.
I’ll quickly walk through the model’s presumptive favorites, as well as a few teams I think the model is underrating.
The main point is that the model doesn’t pay much attention to non-conference games because the outcomes don’t directly impact ACC standings. So beating a ranked team (like Syracuse did vs UNLV) or losing to a Sun Belt team doesn’t change the model’s estimation of a team’s strength as much as conference games. At this early part of the season, this explains a lot of the model’s current outputs.
The Favorites
Clemson is not a surprising favorite to win the ACC title, as they had the second-shortest preseason betting odds (behind FSU, oops). But another reason for their increasingly-favored status in the model is the simple fact that they’ve won three conference games to date, while SMU and Miami have only won two apiece. As a probabilistic model, the simulations always bake in the chance that a team will lose a given game, but a completed game counts 100% in the win column.
Clemson and SMU are also atop the rankings because they’ve played some of their tougher opponents already (at least in terms of preseason expectations). Clemson (FSU and NC State) and SMU (FSU and Lville) have passed their tougher tests, and their schedules lighten up the rest of the season. As of today, both team’s upcoming games vs Pitt (SMU in Week 8, Clemson in Week 10) stand out as the main challenge.
The Sleepers
By vastly discounting non-conference outcomes, the model is bearish on Pitt and Syracuse. Basically, the model has only “learned” that Pitt has beaten a mediocre-at-best UNC team, and one of the model’s few data points on Cuse is the loss to Stanford. Both teams look too dangerous to be ranked 7th and 14th, respectively, in the title odds. However, part of Pitt’s long odds are its tough schedule. Pitt still has dates with Clemson, SMU and Lville — and Pitt and Syracuse square off later this month.
The Vibes
SMU: 🔼 After their big road win over Lville, SMU has broken into the AP Top 25
Pitt: 🔼 Pitt joins SMU, Miami and Clemson in the Top 25 after their win over UNC
Cuse: 🔼 An OT win against a ranked UNLV team. Maybe the Rebels should’ve paid their QB, after all
NC State: 🔽🔽 Grayson McCall’s terrifying injury was compounded by a home loss to Wake
Miami: ➡️ Hard to tell if this team is an unstoppable team of destiny or if trailing mediocre teams means they have some flaws
Week 7 Preview
The five conference tilts this week give us a chance to see if Pitt, UVA and Syracuse can climb into the conference race.
Clemson @ Wake
Model Favorite: Clemson (67%)
Vegas Line: Clemson -20
GT @ UNC
Model Favorite: UNC (62.0%)
Vegas Line: GT -5
Cal @ Pitt
Model Favorite: Pitt (57.7%)
Vegas Line: Pitt -3
Lville @ UVA
Model Favorite: Lville (72.5%)
Vegas Line: Lville -7.5
Cuse @ NC State
Model Favorite: NC State (83.9%)
Vegas Line: Cuse -4.5
Rereading both the title and the use of “stormed back” for a Hurricane-named team, both struck me as tone deaf given the actual chaos and destruction wrought by Hurricanes Helene and Milton
While an insane comeback, I stand by my claim that VT-Miami will be the ACC game of the year