Analysis

Ohio State recruits the 2nd or 3rd best roster in the country almost every year. Nobody needs a model to know that, and a team full of five-stars is supposed t…

Ohio State recruits the 2nd or 3rd best roster in America almost every year. That part is not interesting; everyone knows it, and a team stacked with five-star…

A final score is one draw from a distribution. Two teams play, a few bounces go one way, and the number on the scoreboard becomes the thing everyone argues abo…

There is a version of every football argument that happens on Sunday and a version that happens in a spreadsheet, and they are almost never about the same play…

Trying to out-predict the betting market taught us something we did not enjoy learning: it almost doesn't matter which model you build. We built four that shar…

A betting line has two moments worth caring about: when it opens, and when it closes. The close is razor-sharp — the sum of every sharp bettor's opinion and a…

We spent months trying to build a model that beats the market. Here is the deflating punch line: the most dependable edge we measured requires no model whatsoe…

It's the most intuitive edge in football betting: a team loses its starting quarterback, so you bet against them. Everyone can see the backup is worse. The tro…

After ruling out every version of 'we can predict the game better,' one lead survived — and it's not about talent, which the market prices efficiently. It's ab…

The most common way to build a team-strength rating quietly shortchanges the same three programs every single year, and it can't help itself. Hand it a recipe…

The case that Texas was a real national-title team in 2024 holds up. The reason everyone gives for it doesn't. The story you keep hearing is about Quinn Ewers…

UCLA finished 2024 looking like a team that knew how to win when it mattered, going 5-2 in one-score games while getting blown out everywhere else. That story…

The 2024 Miami Hurricanes went 10-3 and spent the season hanging around the No. 1 conversation. Once you account for who they actually played, they were a genu…

Here is a stat that does something most of our numbers can't: it tells you not who is good right now, but who is about to get better. The field-position gap —…

Texas Tech went 7-5 in 2024 and a certain kind of bettor sees a bargain: a name-brand program, a returning quarterback, and a record that supposedly undersells…

In the ten years we've been able to line up a team's raw talent against what it actually did on the field, nobody has missed by as much as Florida State did in…

Plenty of fans believe certain situations offer a significant edge, home underdogs and huge favorites chief among them. Across thousands of games, every situat…

Logan Bonner's 2021 season is a textbook lesson in how raw volume can fool you. Snap for snap, Bonner was solid but unspectacular. Yet pile up enough snaps and…

The distance between where a team recruits and how it actually plays can be jaw-dropping, and Army and Florida State are the perfect split-screen. Army signed…

Consider UCLA, which went 5-2 in one-score games but 0-5 in all other games. This disparity suggests that their overall record is propped up by close-game vari…

When evaluating a team's or model's performance, it's essential to look beyond the win-loss record. A more nuanced metric is Closing Line Value, which measures…

When you argue about which conference is the best, you have to be clear about what you're actually asking. There's the deepest league, top to bottom, and then…

A handful of teams in 2024 were flat-out better than their records say. Washington is the clearest case. The Huskies finished 5-7 and stayed home for the holid…

The biggest mover on the quarterback leaderboard is Texas's Quinn Ewers. Sort the passers by raw numbers and he sits 35th. But once you give him credit for the…