Movelor Picks: Week 4, 2023

Our Movelor Week 4 picks are live and can be found in a more sortable format than this one here. If you’re curious what Movelor is, this is its homepage, but the short version is that it’s our college football model’s rating system, used across all Division I teams. Last year, it was roughly 0.9 points less accurate on FBS games than the Las Vegas closing spread.

Picks are below, but first, a few observations:

The big story this weekend is how many games feature two undefeated opponents. There are eight matchups between undefeated FBS foes, meaning we’ll see a minimum of 8 and a maximum of 31 undefeated teams at the end of the day on Saturday, down from 39 today. Of the 23 undefeated teams playing a non-undefeated opponent, Movelor expects 6.8 to lose, meaning the expected number of undefeated teams at the end of Week 4 is 24. Here are the undefeated underdogs, plus those favored by Movelor by fewer than seven points:

• UCF +14.5 at Kansas State
• Mississippi +12.8 at Alabama
• Maryland +2.9 at Michigan State
• Georgia State +2.5 at Coastal Carolina
• Auburn +2.1 at Texas A&M
• Florida State –0.9 at Clemson
• North Carolina –1.1 at Pitt

On a similar note, there are 14 teams our model views as more than 10% likely to make the Playoff. Of those 14, two—Ohio State and Notre Dame—play one another. Of the remaining 13, Movelor expects 3.1 losses. This doesn’t mean there’ll be ten teams at or above 10% in Playoff probability come Sunday morning. Ohio State might be above the threshold even with a loss, it’s possible to fall past it with an ugly win, and other teams can rise past that line. But in terms of chaos potential, what this means is that we’re poised to see somewhere around four of the top 14 Playoff contenders go down. Here’s who’s most at risk:

• Florida State –0.9 at Clemson
• Oregon State –6.8 at Washington State
• Texas –8.3 at Baylor
• Oklahoma –10.3 at Cincinnati
• Utah –10.3 vs. UCLA

Behind those 14, there are eleven additional teams our model views as better than 1-in-35 likely to make the Playoff. Of those eleven, four—Clemson, UCLA, Mississippi (+12.8 at Alabama), and Iowa (+14.5 at Penn State)—all play one of the 14 in that >10% tier. Among the remaining seven, Movelor expects 1.23 losses, with North Carolina, Syracuse (–10.0 vs. Army), LSU (­–13.8 vs. Arkansas), and Kansas State most at risk. Altogether? We’re expecting roughly seven of the 25 Playoff-likeliest teams to lose. We’ll have plenty more on this tomorrow in our broader Week 4 preview.

Big game lines we haven’t shared yet, at the Power Five, Group of Five, and FCS levels:

• Ohio State –7.6 at Notre Dame
• Oregon –34.7 vs. Colorado
• Air Force –10.1 at San Jose State
• TCU –13.6 vs. SMU
• Missouri –0.5 vs. Memphis
• Appalachian State –1.6 at Wyoming
• Troy –5.1 vs. Western Kentucky
• Marshall –9.3 vs. Virginia Tech
• Sacramento State –3.0 at Idaho
• Montana State –2.0 at Weber State
• Austin Peay –5.3 at Stephen F. Austin
• Central Arkansas –6.8 vs. Abilene Christian

The biggest favorite of the week is Incarnate Word, checking in with a 55.2-point projected margin against North American University, who is below Division I. In games involving two D-I teams, Tulane is the biggest favorite, given the edge by 46.2 against Nicholls.

The biggest tossup of a game is The Citadel’s against South Carolina State, where SC State is a 0.2-point favorite. In the FBS, it’s NMSU at Hawaii, with the Rainbow Warriors favored by 0.4. Eight separate games have lines closer than 1.0 point this weekend.

As for Movelor’s performance so far: Movelor is even with the opening line in picking correct winners, but it lags behind the closing line by two games. Its absolute error is 1.6 points worse than the opening line and 1.7 points worse than the closing line. Credit to The Prediction Tracker for the markets’ own stats. Overall, Movelor’s is a worse performance than last year’s and the spread’s is a better performance than its own a year ago, but I don’t have week-by-week data, so I don’t know how this compares to last year’s season at this point. My hope is that Movelor will make up ground, but that implies Movelor outperforming the spread, and that seems unlikely given just how simple Movelor is. Overall, Movelor is doing fine, and we’re excited for it to at least be within two touchdowns now of the market’s perception of Colorado.

With that, here’s the full grid: