All Movelor’s Week 8 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 worse this year (14.1-point average miss) than last year (12.9 points), but it did better this past week (13.2 points). This is generally what we expect—we expect accuracy to improve as the season goes on. The biggest thing we want to work on with Movelor in the future is how it reacts to the offseason and to early-season results.
Here’s what it’s got this week:
Big Games
- Louisville by 0.6 over Miami
- Alabama by 2.7 at Tennessee
- Texas by 9.9 over Georgia
Playoff-Impacting Games
- Oregon by 27.7 at Purdue
- BYU by 7.9 over Oklahoma State
- Clemson by 22.4 over Virginia
- Army by 15.3 over East Carolina
- Washington State by 26.3 over Hawaii
- Notre Dame by 15.5 vs. Georgia Tech
- Tulane by 27.6 over Rice
- James Madison by 12.8 at Georgia Southern
- Texas A&M by 10.5 at Mississippi State
- LSU by 7.5 at Arkansas
- Kansas State by 4.9 at West Virginia
- Iowa State by 15.6 over UCF
- SMU by 18.3 at Stanford
Interesting Games
- Cincinnati by 1.9 over Arizona State
- Missouri by 10.8 over Auburn
- Indiana by 3.3 over Nebraska
- Wisconsin by 4.3 at Northwestern
- Oklahoma by 5.1 over South Carolina
- Navy by 18.0 over Charlotte
- Michigan by 9.3 at Illinois
- Texas Tech by 9.9 over Baylor
- Arizona by 5.8 over Colorado
- USC by 7.2 at Maryland
- Iowa by 8.3 at Michigan State
- Memphis by 15.3 over North Texas
- Florida by 1.3 over Kentucky
- Oregon State by 2.3 over UNLV
- Utah by 9.6 over TCU
FCS (Movelor) Top 25 Matchups
- South Dakota State by 2.7 at North Dakota State
- Sacramento State by 3.5 over Weber State
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Highlights from Week 7:
- Movelor didn’t hit any spreads on the nose, but it was within a point on four of them, including Penn State/USC and Marshall/Georgia Southern at the FBS level.
- Movelor’s biggest miss of Week 7 came in the SWAC, where Alabama A&M beat Bethune-Cookman by 44 as a 2.7-point favorite. At the FBS level, the two biggest misses were Wisconsin’s upset of Rutgers and Northwestern’s upset of Maryland. The vengeance of the Big Ten West.
- SP+ had a very good week, so Movelor now trails that model by 1.3 points per game again after briefly cutting the lead to 1.2 points. Movelor trails FPI by 1.4. We may have been a little lucky last year, when we were well within a point of both.
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Overall stats through 827 games:
- FBS vs. FBS: 67.4% correct winners; 14.1-point absolute average error margin
- All FBS: 74.4% correct winners; 13.7-point absolute average error margin
- FCS vs. FCS: 70.6% correct winners; 13.6-point absolute average error margin
- All Division I: 73.6% correct winners; 14.1-point absolute average error margin
