📧 You're Invited: Staturdays App Public Beta

Plus, spread prediction modeling and Week 13 picks

Good morning folks and happy game day! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

I’ll keep this short this morning, but I did want to share some expected value picks with you this weekend, and also announce some exciting news.

First, the news: the Beta version of the Staturdays app is now live, and you are getting the first invitation to check it out! This early version was built with our newsletter readers in mind, with the goal of getting you your information as early and often as you want it each week. It includes our expected value information, Elo win probabilities, up-to-date ratings, and the ability for you to plot any teams and see how their Elo ratings stack up. We also have an overtime simulator for you to play around with that will let you input any two teams and it will tell you how likely they are to win an overtime matchup.

These are just the early features—there’s a lot more in store! If you have any ideas for new features, we’re all ears! Let us know what would be helpful to you. And for now, take a look and send over any feedback on our first version of our app. We’ll be constantly upgrading it the rest of the season.

You can access our app at kylebennison.shinyapps.io/staturdays/. Right now, it’s best-viewed on a desktop, but the mobile version works fine and we’ll be optimizing it to be even better soon.

In other news, we had some feedback about wanting to learn more about modeling and predicting spreads. If you’re one of those people interested, check out our latest article on building a simple spread prediction model using R. It’s a little bit technical, so if you haven’t familiarized yourself with R, you’ll want to do that first before you get into any modeling. Please send me an email if you’re looking for resources to get started.

Now to some Saturday-slate games.

Week 13

So this is really it. Next week we’ll have conference championship games, Week 15 is Army-Navy, and then it’s bowl-season!

This weekend, we have the battle for bowl-eligibility with the recently head-coachless Florida Gators and the Florida State Seminoles, the battle of the newly 10-year-tenured coaches in Penn State and Michigan State, “The Game” as they so humbly call it up in Ann Arbor at noon, and of course “Bedlam” in Oklahoma. And you can bet on three out of the four, according to our expected value table!

Win Probabilities

For our win probabilities this week, check out our new app! All you have to do is choose the “Win Probabilities” tab under “Elo”, and you can search for any team or conference and find what you’re looking for.

Enjoy our last day of regular-season college football in 2021!

— Kyle