Movelor is live again (homepage here, full FBS ratings here, Week Zero picks here), and while we don’t have the College Football Playoff probabilities which accompany it yet, there’s plenty to talk about. Specifically, we’re going to talk about where it disagrees with the narrative, and where—perhaps more interestingly—it agrees.
Where It Disagrees
We don’t do a whole lot with Movelor in the way of offseason adjustments. Those are sparse for us. Not all disagreements with the AP Poll and betting markets and other ratings systems come from this approach, though. Some predate the offseason.
Our significant disagreements with the AP Top 25 are, in varying fashions: Michigan, Tennessee, Utah, TCU, LSU, Kansas State, Florida State, Iowa, Texas Tech, Minnesota, Washington, Louisville, USC, Illinois, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Texas A&M, and North Carolina. That’s a lot of schools. Out of the 28 in either of our top 25’s, that’s well more than half. Let’s hash them out:
Michigan
Michigan beat Ohio State last year, and Michigan beat Ohio State the year before, and Michigan returns some of the most production in the country. Still, Movelor isn’t sold that they’re clearly better than the Buckeyes. It has them fourth, behind Alabama as well.
This is a fairly meaningless distinction. The three are separated by only 1.1 points, something that can be made up in Movelor by a few garbage-time touchdowns against Northwestern or Mizzou. But the AP has the Wolverines closer to Georgia than to Ohio State, and Movelor doesn’t buy it. Zooming out and adding context, I still find myself siding with Movelor. The Wolverines bullied Ohio State in the snow in 2021, but last year’s game was closer than the final score indicated. This is meaningful with Movelor, because Movelor does not know that any game can be any different from its final score. Movelor should have thought even more of Michigan’s performance than the public did. The fact it didn’t shows just how outlandish the reaction to that single game has become.
Michigan is a great team, and might even be the Big Ten East favorite when we get those probabilities out there, with The Game in Ann Arbor this year. But to say they’re clearly better than Ohio State or Alabama is a reach.
Tennessee, Utah
Joe Milton has his doubters, but he’s not why Tennessee is ranked 5th by Movelor. Movelor has Tennessee ranked 5th because they beat Alabama last year, gave Georgia one of its toughest games (a low standard, but technically true), punked a lot of other good teams (LSU by 27, Kentucky by 38, Clemson by 17), and bounced back well after the South Carolina loss (the Vols beat Vandy 56–0 the next week and then went and did what they did to Clemson).
This is just a theory, but something I think Movelor might be accidentally right about is how little quarterbacks matter in college football. They definitely matter, of course. They obviously matter. But the talent gaps elsewhere are so much bigger than they are in the NFL that the difference between a good and a mediocre player under center gets washed out more. I don’t think Tennessee’s a top-5 team. But I do think Milton could have a Hendon Hooker season this year.
Utah, meanwhile, may be held back in the polls by Cam Rising’s uncertain injury status but are more likely held back by having lost four games last year. When they were good, they were great, but their topline record wasn’t spectacular and for how highly the media allegedly thought and thinks of USC, it didn’t give Utah all that much credit for the Pac-12 Championship beatdown. I don’t personally see why Utah isn’t a top-10 team, but I do acknowledge that they could use some more consistency. Pretty much every year. They are consistent in their inconsistency.
LSU, Florida State
These are two where Movelor is mildly low on them but agrees they’re good. LSU’s 5th in the AP Poll and 9th in Movelor. Florida State’s 8th and 14th. I wrote about this with FSU in our explanation of how Movelor works, but a very tempting thought pattern with any sport is to look at a team that got better one year and expect it to get even better the next. That’s not necessarily going to be the case.
I’m more sympathetic to the LSU hype than I am to FSU’s. LSU has a second-year coach who’s been successful everywhere he’s gone (at winning games, not at certain other important parts of the job) and is now working with the most talent he’s probably ever had. FSU has a fourth-year coach who just turned in his first winning season in Tallahassee. The cupboard was pretty dry there when he took over, but the ACC was atrocious. What was last year’s best win? The Cheez-It Bowl against unranked Oklahoma?
Thankfully, Florida State’s going to help us get answers. They play a tough nonconference schedule relative to most of the rest of the country, with the neutral-site game next weekend against LSU and the trip to Gainesville over Thanksgiving. They also play at Clemson. What this means is that if Clemson’s still the team to beat in the ACC, how FSU performs against LSU and Florida will help us know how Clemson measures up, and that if FSU’s now the king of the conference again, they’ll either get themselves to 12–1 or they won’t. They’re going to be a key figure this college football season, and I would guess we all form something of a truce on them by the end of October or so.
TCU, Kansas State
Movelor was low on TCU all last year and is now high on the Horned Frogs. I think the poll is probably right on this. TCU was impressive, but without that upset of Michigan (one largely driven by Michigan’s mistakes), I don’t know that they’d be in Movelor’s top ten right now. That was such a shocking game. They have massive roster turnover, and sitting just two points ahead of the 16th-ranked Movelor team, I could see them dropping fast (though I do think we should all expect them to whoop Colorado in the opener).
Kansas State is a tougher call. The gap isn’t actually that wide—Movelor has the Wildcats 10th, the poll has them 16th—but if you take TCU out of the mix, that becomes the difference between K-State or Texas being best in the Big 12. K-State did have a lot of turnover on defense, but that should still be a relative strength in that conference. Their schedule’s pretty kind, too. They might be one that keeps skating by while we keep wondering on them all the way to the College Football Playoff. Kind of like last year’s TCU.
USC, Washington
Ok, we can talk about the big one.
Movelor still loathes USC.
What started this is that USC was built entirely on transfers last year, and we had never seen that before, and they had been so bad in 2021 and their recruiting situation was so poor that Movelor, using traditional predictors, said they would stink. They did not stink, they went 11–3, but…were they really all that good? Utah crushed them in the Pac-12 Championship. Tulane beat them in the Cotton Bowl. Bowl effort varies, but that was a bad loss.
I have a hard time believing USC is a top ten team, and I have a hard time believing that their defense is suddenly good thanks to another crop of transfers. I think Movelor’s probably underestimating them, but the public was overestimating them so dramatically even by the end of last year that I don’t think anybody’s right. Their schedule doesn’t scream, either, though they do have to play both Washington and Oregon, and the Notre Dame game’s in South Bend this year. I understand buying in, but I think it’s like betting on a baseball team with no starting pitching winning the World Series. Maybe they can bop their way there, but the offense is going to have to be consistently spectacular to make that happen, and it’s kind of laughable to think of what Alabama or Georgia could do to them. USC is a poor man’s Ohio State.
With them is Washington, who is a very popular sleeper, to the point where everyone named them a sleeper and now they’re in the AP Top Ten. The eleven wins last year were nice. I can totally concede that. But whom exactly did they beat? It was Texas in the Alamo Bowl, Oregon in Eugene, and Oregon State at home. Oh, and a Michigan State team that didn’t make a bowl. They also lost to ASU? I know Michael Penix Jr. has a funny name, but I think we need to see more from Kalen DeBoer before this anointing happens. Was Oregon good?
Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin
Movelor loves the Big Ten West, with one exception. It isn’t too high on Wisconsin. It likes them—it has them 26th—but it’s skeptical compared to the rankings.
What I think is especially interesting about this is that Wisconsin just underwent a big coaching transition. You might think that would mean the program’s going to have some growing pains, and I kind of think that, but the public is taking it the opposite way. I do think Luke Fickell would be my choice for third-best coach in the country, though (behind Saban and Smart, in order), for whatever that’s worth. So maybe this is the moment for the Badgers.
Elsewhere in the division, Movelor’s high on all of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. Minnesota and Illinois have a lot to do with the lack of returning production (nobody told Movelor about that part), so I’ll give those to the polls, but I think the prevailing thought around Iowa is mainly revulsion at how they keep keeping Brian Ferentz, and I share that revulsion but I don’t think it matters that much. Iowa’s defense is spectacular. Bill Connelly’s SP+ has it as the best in the country. That’s going to win these guys a lot of games.
One interesting thing to me about these Big Ten West teams and Movelor is that you would think a system built largely on pure margin of victory and defeat would overestimate teams like USC, who score a million points, and underestimate teams like Illinois, who grind you into the dust. Maybe there’s a reverse effect where USC never blows out bad teams by enough to impress even though they’re comfortably winning, and Illinois keeps good teams artificially close, but I kind of think that isn’t the case. I think the public has seen the Big Ten West get smoked by the Big Ten East in so many conference championships that there’s a collective undervaluing going on. These guys aren’t that bad. Inconsistent? I don’t even think that. I think they’re ugly, and when they lose, it looks worse than when USC loses. But I don’t think Iowa’s necessarily worse than USC. And I personally dislike Iowa.
Texas Tech, Louisville
Movelor has Texas Tech 18th. The AP has them 26th. I like Movelor’s estimation of them. They weren’t great last year, and the bottom fell out a few times, but they’re a tough, high-scoring team who put some big notches in their belt against Oklahoma and Texas in a year when those two were paradoxically probably undervalued. I don’t think they’ll give Brett Yormark the Thanksgiving he wants, but they’re going to be a factor in this Big 12.
Louisville’s story is similar. It’s like the AP (which has them tied with Kansas for 35th while Movelor has them 21st) forgot about these guys. Yes, there should be growing pains with Brian Brohm newly back in town, but this is the first time in a long time Louisville’s had alignment between its boosters, its coach, and whatever stands for its administration these days. A great team? No. A factor in the ACC? I kinda think so. I’m extremely bullish on these guys in 2025—I would love to see some odds on them to win the ACC that year—but even this year, I think they have a good thing cooking, and Movelor seems to agree.
Mississippi, Texas A&M, North Carolina
The disagreements on Mississippi and A&M aren’t huge. They’re barely ranked by the AP, Movelor has each in the 30’s. Mississippi gets some love because of its returning production, and probably a little overestimate because when Lane Kiffin’s teams are good, Lane Kiffin’s teams are fun. Texas A&M still has so, so, so much talent, and six of their seven losses came by a single score. I do think Movelor has a good read on them—there are problems there which are hampering the talent—but I get the sentiment.
The disagreement on UNC is massive, and this is one where I’m very confident Movelor is right. People love to hype UNC, and UNC is a prime example of a good-QB team. The problem is that they still haven’t had a legitimately good football team since the 90s (maybe 2015, but besides that, the 90s). They will win in impressive fashion at times and maybe do well in the ACC, but this is neither your father nor your grandfather’s Mack Brown. He has parts of it, but the whole package isn’t there.
Where It Agrees
Whew. That was a lot. I oversold this agreement section. The disagreements were more interesting.
Um…Movelor likes Georgia. We can start with that. Movelor also likes Penn State. Penn State is our other collective sleeper, and Movelor is down with that cause.
The big thing Movelor agrees with the public on is how the conferences stack up. The best six teams in the country are, per both Movelor and the Associated Press, all in the SEC and the Big Ten. The Big 12 and the Pac-12 have some top 25 depth. The ACC is Florida State and Clemson and maybe one other longshot. Texas is solid but not all the way there yet. Notre Dame is good but in a little bit of no-man’s land. Clemson has proving to do.
I do think the initial AP Top 25 is interesting because it’s still an opinion of how good teams are, rather than just a haphazard version of national standings. In a few weeks, Clemson will be up in the top five without having beaten anybody and we will be down another spiraling staircase of groupthink, but for now, the AP is doing something worthwhile.
We could have gotten into disagreements at the FCS level too, and those are out there. Movelor is low on Holy Cross, and on everyone in the eastern half of the country. It doesn’t believe in Furman. It doesn’t believe in William & Mary. It does not think New Hampshire is back. But I think the most interesting piece here is what Movelor does think, and it’s something we talked about last week when discussing the future of the Mountain West: The balance of FCS power is heavily located west of the Mississippi. The polls aren’t as dramatic about this as Movelor is—Movelor has all top nine teams west of the river—but they agree. The coaches and the media both have South Dakota State, North Dakota State, and Montana State up top, with Incarnate Word and Sacramento State and a third Big Sky school also in the top ten.
A great thing to watch for—and we’ll hopefully get into this more—is how good the Big Sky can be. With North Dakota State potentially down a little but South Dakota State resoundingly good (they’re 27th in the whole country right now, per Movelor, just behind Wisconsin), it’s a battle for second place, and the Big Sky has five teams in the top eight fighting that battle, with Idaho additionally one of the top-ten options in the polls (12th in Movelor). College football fans are in a habit right now of claiming they love late-night football even though it sucks. It is, to hear them tell it, the thing they will miss most about the Pac-12. Well, let’s see you prove it. Watch some Big Sky on ESPN+. Those six teams around the top should all be better than Stanford and Colorado.
