Model-driven college football coverage from the Gridpex desks.
Auburn is favored less for what it added than for what it already proved: 20.7 points allowed last season behind the nation's second-ranked run defense. That f…
South Carolina went 4-8 last season and allowed 22.1 points a game — a losing record attached to a defense that finished sixth nationally against the run. Kent…
A 4-8 team that scored 21.8 points a game is laying three touchdowns at home. That says more about what Coastal Carolina lost than about anything West Virginia…
South Florida is favored by 13.2 on the strength of a season neither team is fielding intact. Last year's body of work is worth 11.7 of the 18.1 points that se…
Oregon -24.5 is a large number for a game in which the quarterback column is a wash. Nearly 13 of the 22 points separating these teams comes from last season's…
Duke grades 7.6 points better than an 11-3 Tulane team, and 4.5 of that is the game being in Durham. The next-largest piece is the portal, worth about two poin…
Nebraska is favored by 23.8 mostly on paperwork. The largest slice of the 15.5-point rating gap is last season's body of work, worth 4.9 points, with home fiel…
Ole Miss grades 17.6 points better than Louisville. The largest single piece of that, 7.6 points, is what the two teams did last fall: 13-2 against 9-4. The qu…
Wisconsin arrives with the settled quarterback and still gets 20.5 points. Colton Joseph has two FBS seasons and +0.282 EPA per play of record; CJ Carr, Notre…
SMU has not taken a snap this season and is still favored on the road. The 7.7-point gap between these teams is largely a roster accounting problem: transfer t…
UNLV beat Hawai'i by 28 the last time these teams met, and almost none of the passing production that did it is still in Las Vegas. Hawai'i grades 9.4 points t…
Miami grades 26.5 points better than Stanford, and 19.8 of that comes from last season's body of work, against 2.5 for the quarterback gap. Stanford has alread…
USC is favored by three touchdowns less for anything it did last Saturday than for the 17.9 points of separation built across a full season. Of that gap, 7.4 t…
Eastern Michigan sent 26 players into the portal and brought back 12, a net loss of 30 stars' worth of talent — the kind of teardown that widens every error ba…
Opening weekend has been a good place to lay two touchdowns. Among 120 FBS home favorites of 13 to 20 points in the season's first week, 2013 through 2023, the…
New Mexico is an 11.5-point home favorite over Central Michigan, and our projection wants 16.5. The five-point gap reads modest until the stadium comes out of…
Our projection makes Western Kentucky a 6.5-point favorite at Nevada on Sept. 5. Bovada and DraftKings both post 2.5, and the quoted range across the two books…
Ohio State is a 50.8-point favorite over Ball State — Bovada and DraftKings, quoted between 51 and 50.5 — and our cover table reports the favorite covering 0%…
Across 176 non-neutral games since 2013 in which a Power-4 host closed as a 12.7- to 19.7-point favorite over a visitor from the MAC, Conference USA, the Sun B…
Two books have this posted, Bovada and DraftKings, between 20 and 20.5, consensus 20.2. We project Houston by 24.5. The 4.3 points in between rest on no 2026 g…
Our projection has Cincinnati by 11.1 at Nippert Stadium; Bovada and DraftKings both sit on 7.5, a gap of 3.6 points. Converted into implied team scores, that…
Take FBS Week 1 games from 2013 through 2025 in which the road team closed favored by 10.7 to 17.7 points — the band Oklahoma State's -14.2 at Tulsa sits in —…
Bridgeforth Stadium opens on Sept. 5 with a rematch almost nobody on the field played in. James Madison won 12 games last fall, beat Liberty 31-13 in Lynchburg…
Washington State spent last fall building one of the better defenses in the country: 19th nationally, 15th against the pass, the reason a 7-6 team was so hard…
