Every year it’s the same. The team moves in to campus. Camp starts. The Instagrams start coming. The pads come on. The reports get written. And then the sun rises one Saturday morning and you wake up with more motivation than you’ve had in a while. Today is gameday. Chills.
Except this year it’s different. It’s better. It’s more important. The schedule is back to normal. The fans are back in the stands and in the parking lots. The narrative—we hope—will be back to football first and foremost. Not cancellations or schedule rearrangements or opt-outs or positive tests.
We already got a taste of it last weekend and it was glorious. The College Gameday desk is smaller, the guys are sitting closer together, Lee Corso is in his rightful place among them, and fans set the scene once more with their early-morning enthusiasm. The games may not have all been played well, but they were all played.
So let’s get you up to speed.
In This Email
Welcome
Games to Watch
ICYMI
Week 1 Win Probabilities
For Those Of You That Are New
Hey there! Thanks for subscribing and following along. I’m Kyle, and my goal will be to help you be a smarter college football fan each week. We’ll talk about success rates, strength of schedule, expected points added, and, of course, Elo ratings.
This should hit your inbox every Thursday morning around 8 am for your reading pleasure leading up to the Saturday slate of games. If you find it going to some other folder, just make sure to add this email address to your contacts, drag it to your primary inbox, or whatever else you have to do. Let’s get started!
Games to Watch
Week 1 of college football does not disappoint this year. We are heading in with a bang. I’m not sure if it’s the College Football Playoff putting pressure on teams to schedule better non-conference matchups, but it’s definitely a consequential week for some major Top-25 teams right out of the gate.
We have Alabama vs. Miami, Georgia vs. Clemson, Notre Dame vs. Florida St., Penn State vs. Wisconsin, Ohio State vs. Minnesota, Indiana vs. Iowa, LSU vs. UCLA… just typing this I’m astonished at what I’m seeing right now.
I’m sure we’ll pay for this later on a random Week 13 where Alabama plays Birmingham Community College or something, but I’m happy that college football is coming back in an emphatic way.
Many of those results will follow those teams all the way to selection Sunday.
An interesting one to watch will be LSU @ UCLA, since UCLA already played in Week 0 and had it pretty easy in a 44-10 win against Hawaii. That game will be at 8:30 PM on FOX this Saturday. I’m making it my goal to watch more Pac-12 football this year so I’ll report back next week if that actually happens or not.
Catch Up
We’ve been hard at work getting prepped for the 2021 season, and we’ve already put out a bunch of articles in the past few weeks.
I looked at home-field advantage in 2020
I measured the importance of fans in home-field advantage
I looked at the most consistent QBs in CFB
Brian previewed the Penn State football season
Drew simulated the 2021 season for all Power-5 conferences
and just for fun… I graded score bugs from a bunch of different sports
Week 1 Win Probabilities
So here we go, the Elo predictions for Week 1. Historically, week 1 has been Elo’s best week of the year, mostly because there are many lopsided games that Elo predicts at near 100% or near 0% probability, meaning our predictions aren’t usually off by much. It’s later in the year when a lot of games are 50/50 that Elo suffers.
If you need a quick refresher on Elo, you can check out this post from Staturdays that explains the rating system in more detail, but the elevator pitch is:
Points-system, Power-5 conference schools average 1500 points, with the best teams like ‘Bama around 2100 and the worst teams like Rutgers around 1000-1100. You gain or lose points based on wins or losses, and we can predict win probabilities based on the difference in two teams’ Elo ratings.
It’s a very long list this week so I’ll sign off here. I’m glad to be back and excited for all these great matchups. Thanks for reading and talk soon.
— Kyle