All Movelor’s Week 7 predictions are now live at this link.
What is Movelor?
It’s our college football model’s rating system, one which measures the gap in quality between every FBS and FCS team. Last season, it was 0.8 points less accurate on a per-game basis than the betting market’s closing spread.
How’s it doing this year?
It’s been a little worse this year (14.2-point average miss) than last year (12.9 points), and this past week was especially rough. For most of the season so far, Movelor’s improved every week, but it regressed in Weeks 5 and 6. That’s surprising and goes against a lot of history, where normally Movelor gets better as the season goes on. This makes us think it’s probably an oddity. But, it might be significant, and we’ll of course keep tracking how the model performs. Here’s what it’s got this week:
Big Games
- Ohio State by 3.4 at Oregon
- Penn State by 3.7 at USC
- Texas by 15.6 vs. Oklahoma
- Mississippi by 4.9 at LSU
- Iowa State by 0.8 at West Virginia
- Kansas State by 10.8 at Colorado
Playoff-Impacting Games
- Liberty by 26.7 over FIU
- Utah by 7.8 at Arizona State
- Clemson by 22.7 at Wake Forest
- Alabama by 24.8 over South Carolina
- Notre Dame by 33.4 over Stanford
- BYU by 3.5 over Arizona
- Georgia by 32.6 over Mississippi State
- Tennessee by 18.6 over Florida
- Boise State by 23.6 at Hawaii
Interesting Games
- James Madison by 13.6 over Coastal Carolina
- UNLV by 19.0 at Utah State
- Army by 19.0 over UAB
- Toledo by 9.6 at Buffalo
- Washington by 2.8 at Iowa
- Pitt by 0.3 over California
- Louisville by 8.0 at Virginia
- Washington State by 3.7 at Fresno State
FCS (Movelor) Top 25 Matchups
- Illinois State by 1.1 over Missouri State
- Furman by 3.5 over Chattanooga
- North Dakota State by 17.7 at Southern Illinois
- Montana by 5.6 over Northern Arizona
- Montana State by 6.6 over Idaho
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Highlights from Week 6:
- Movelor hit the correct margin on one Week 6 game, correctly predicting Louisiana to beat Southern Miss by ten points.
- Movelor’s biggest miss came in a game involving a non-Division I team (Movelor treats those all the same), as Mercyhurst beat Buffalo State by 51 points more than the expected four-point margin. Its biggest miss between FCS teams was a 43-point whiff on the SIU/Illinois State game, where Illinois State pounded the Salukis despite entering Carbondale an underdog. Movelor’s biggest miss in games involving FBS teams came in Charlotte, where the 49ers upset East Carolina in a 31-point victory. Movelor had the Pirates an 11-point favorite.
- SP+ also had a rough week, so Movelor now only trails that model by 1.2 points per game. It trails FPI by the same amount. We don’t expect it to beat that pair for accuracy—Movelor is very simple—but it was well within a point of both of them last year.
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Overall stats through 720 games:
- FBS vs. FBS: 67.5% correct winners; 14.2-point absolute average error margin
- All FBS: 75.3% correct winners; 13.8-point absolute average error margin
- FCS vs. FCS: 70.0% correct winners; 13.6-point absolute average error margin
- All Division I: 74.0% correct winners; 14.2-point absolute average error margin
