We’ll have plenty to say about Week 1 tomorrow, but since neither TCU nor UNC is breaking into our Week 2 bracketology, we couldn’t help ourselves and went and looked at it today. After 10,000 simulations…
Moving Out: Alabama, Clemson, Arizona State, Boise State
Five of the twelve teams in last week’s bracketology lost, but while Texas and Notre Dame managed to stay in the field, the other three did not. Arizona State’s the interesting one here. They won but fell out because Iowa State impressed our model more.
Moving In: LSU, Iowa State, Tennessee, Tulane
From what AP voters are saying, LSU is about to get a lot of hype, but their schedule is tough and Movelor—our model’s power rating system—only thinks they’re the eighth-best team in the country (fourth-best in the SEC). Our bracket is basically each team’s average season lined up from best to eleventh. LSU’s average season is the ninth-best in the country.
Tulane is a weird case in that it has a worse playoff chance than Memphis, marginally, but a better chance to win the AAC. It’s how each team’s schedule breaks. Our model makes sure it has five conference favorites in there, so it takes Tulane over Memphis. Flip a coin.
Moving Up: Georgia (to a bye), Miami (to a home game), Mississippi (to a home game)
Georgia actually isn’t our model’s SEC favorite, but their average season is the third-best in the country. Texas’s is only fifth now that it has that loss.
Miami’s the new ACC favorite. Mississippi has a slightly better average outcome than LSU in our model’s eyes.
Moving Down: Notre Dame (out of a bye)
The Irish are still one of seven teams with better than a 50% playoff chance. Not coincidentally, those are the top seven in that bracket.
Playoff probabilities and average final rankings:
Only eleven teams have an average finish in the top 25, but remember that every good team’s graph of possible outcomes is skewed to the right. Have a great season, and there’s only so high you can rise. Have a bad season, and there’s plenty of room to fall. This is average, not median.
USC raises some eyebrows, but two of that program’s losses last year came to playoff semifinalists and five of their six losses came in one-possession games. They also only play two games in the Eastern Time Zone this year, and they don’t play anybody close to the East Coast. Both those set them up better than they were set up in their Big Ten debut.
That said, one of the updates we made to our model this summer was training Movelor to react more aggressively to results in the first five weeks of the season. (Accuracy improvement: Roughly a tenth of a point per game.) That change will create some seesaws, but it’ll help our model catch up faster on programs like Florida State, whom it really overestimated last year and is probably now underestimating this year. We’ll see whether the change is too aggressive to accurately gauge USC.
Speaking of Movelor, here’s what it says about the 25 best teams in the country, with a small chance TCU will climb in after tonight:
To translate this a little: Movelor would have Ohio State a 6.8-point favorite in a rematch against Texas in Columbus. It would have Notre Dame favored by 0.3 against Miami in Florida. It would have LSU favored by 3.3 over Clemson in South Carolina.
We mentioned that Movelor’s reacting more dramatically right now than it will later this season. On that note, teams who outperformed Movelor’s expectations by more than two touchdowns include: Oregon, Mississippi, Iowa State, USC, Missouri, and BYU. Those are six that last year’s Movelor would have moved up a little slower. Of course, cupcake games do have predictive power, and we did make this change to make Movelor more accurate. But if you think Movelor’s overrating some of those teams, I’m sympathetic to your viewpoint.
Every reputable college football prediction system gets something like a full point better as the season goes on. Considering the average error margin for betting spreads and models like ours is in the 12 to 13-point range, a full point of improvement is a lot. Uncertainty is high right now. Which is the perfect note on which to send you into UNC vs. TCU.
If you want more details on how our model works, here’s last year’s explanation. As we mentioned, some things have changed, but it’s largely the same. We’ll get an updated version of that link up later this week, plus every team’s playoff probability, average wins, and other data like that. Thanks to our regulars who keep bearing with us during this slow 2025 rollout. If you’re new here, welcome. It only gets better from here.
If you enjoy these posts and want to receive them more directly, we have two options for you. The first is to subscribe to our Substack, where we currently exclusively publish college football blog posts roughly six days a week. The second is to subscribe to our daily newsletter, a morning rundown of everything going on at The Barking Crow.
**
