ACC Football Preview
Who will win the ACC (hint: Lville?)
Now that we’ve welcomed our newcomers, we’re ready to kick off Week 1 of the college football season, with several ACC teams playing tomorrow. Despite the limited slate of Week 0, we’ve already had a quintessentially ACC stumble to the football season (#goacc), with Georgia Tech upsetting FSU in Dublin.
Today, I’m giving a quick preview of the ACC football season, including:
Model-based projections for who’ll win the ACC (compared to betting odds1)
A quick detour into how the GT-FSU upset ripples across the odds
Model-based projections for the final standings (compared to media polls)
Who will win the ACC
I’m unveiling a model that simulates2 the entire ACC conference schedule to predict who will play in and win the ACC Championship Game. I plan to update the predictions each week3 to see how the outcomes change the odds.
Here are the preseason predictions — meaning before Week 0 — compared to the preseason betting odds.
Compared to the betting markets, the model thinks FSU, Clemson and NC State are a tad overrated. But the model’s biggest divergence from betting odds is Miami, cautioning fans about buying the Miami hype4.
On the flip side, the model is more bullish on Louisville than the markets. VT is emerging as a trendy dark horse pick, but both the markets and model give the Hokies about a 9% chance to win their first ACC title since 2010.
All these projections are preseason projections and don’t include FSU’s Dublin disaster.
How the FSU loss changes the odds
The model gave GT a ~31% chance of pulling the upset — slightly better but generally in line with the 9.5 point spread5. While certainly a surprise, the odds weren’t too absurd, but the loss is particularly damaging to FSU’s ACC title hopes6 . FSU’s odds drop to 13%, and Louisville and GT are the biggest beneficiaries.
Lville: Both FSU and Lville have tough schedules, facing Clemson and Miami. FSU already tallying an L means the Cards have improved odds relative to the Noles. FSU must net a game against those presumed favorites to keep pace with Lville.
GT: The Jackets might have scored a “program-defining win,7” but they’re still long-shots to win the ACC title, coming in at 5.7%. But that’s about a 3x increase from their preseason odds.
Projected ACC standings
The projections above calculate how often a team wins the ACC title, not necessarily where they’ll fall in the league standings. Next, we’ll compare the model’s projected standings8 to the preseason media poll.
The model generally agrees with the media (8 of 17 teams are within 1 spot of each other in the projections), but there are some major disagreements. Once again, the model is not a big believer in Miami and is bullish on Louisville. And these are the preseason projections that don’t bake in Lville’s improved odds from the FSU loss.
First off, the model projects a close race at the top of the standings, so Lville only narrowly edges out Clemson and FSU. Before you dunk on the model, remember that Cal (2), Georgia Tech (1) and Boston College (1) all received at least one first-place media vote, so it’s not the only one going out on a limb with a (semi)underdog pick.
Much of Miami’s hype is tied to transfer QB Cam Ward, the ACC preseason Player of the Year. We’re already off to a typically chaotic ACC season, so we’ll tune in to see if Ward can prove the model wrong and if FSU can recover from their Dublin stumble.
I’m using FanDuel’s odds. I’m calculating the “implied odds” from the lines, so percentages add up to more than 1 because I’m not removing the vig
With 68 ACC conference games, there are about 300 quintillion (that’s 18 zeros) permutations of outcomes
I plan to update the model after weeks with conference games. The model won’t change much from non-conference games
Apparently the model read my football vibes intro to Miami
A 9.5 point spread roughly translates to 75% winning odds for the favorite team
After last year’s CFP snub, FSU’s chances to get into the expanded 12-team playoff are largely linked to their conference performance, too, since the ACC champ will get an auto-bye in the CFP
This is the rank of their average standing across the 1,000 simulations. For example, Lville’s average rank was 4.370, only a hair above Clemson’s 4.374