All Movelor’s Week 9 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 (13.7-point average miss) than last year (12.9 points), but it did just turn in its best week of the season (11.5 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
- Boise State by 0.9 at UNLV
- Notre Dame by 24.6 vs. Navy
- Indiana by 2.9 over Washington
- LSU by 5.4 at Texas A&M
- Penn State by 7.1 at Wisconsin
- SMU by 5.6 at Duke
Playoff-Impacting Games
- Ohio State by 27.7 over Nebraska
- Mississippi by 17.2 over Oklahoma
- Oregon by 21.9 over Illinois
- BYU by 3.7 at UCF
- Alabama by 15.6 over Missouri
- Texas by 26.7 at Vanderbilt
- Miami by 13.7 over Florida State
- Kansas State by 16.9 over Kansas
Interesting Games
- Liberty by 23.1 at Kennesaw State
- Pitt by 6.1 over Syracuse
- USC by 12.3 over Rutgers
- Tulane by 9.2 at North Texas
- Michigan by 16.6 over Michigan State
- Colorado by 6.2 over Cincinnati
Top 25* FCS Matchups
- Mercer by 6.0 over Western Carolina
- South Dakota State by 15.9 over South Dakota
*Movelor’s Top 25, so the 25 best FCS teams.
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Highlights from Week 8:
- Movelor hit five different spreads on the dot, matching its highest total from a single week this season. At the FBS level, it had NMSU winning by three over Louisiana Tech and Eastern Michigan beating Central Michigan by four.
- Movelor’s biggest miss of the week came in the Big Ten, where Indiana outperformed its 3.3-point favorite status by 45.7 points.
- SP+ and FPI were also 11.5 points off of final results (the closing spread was 11.0 points off, for context), but with Movelor having the worse season so far, this narrowed the Movelor/SP+ and Movelor/FPI gap. After finishing last year roughly half a point off of each, it’s currently 1.1 points behind both.
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Overall stats through 940 games:
- FBS vs. FBS: 67.7% correct winners; 13.7-point absolute average error margin
- All FBS: 73.8% correct winners; 13.5-point absolute average error margin
- FCS vs. FCS: 70.5% correct winners; 13.6-point absolute average error margin
- All Division I: 73.2% correct winners; 13.9-point absolute average error margin
