For the first time this year, our college football predictions had a better record than the Vegas oddsmakers. Usually we hit that mark a little earlier than the sixth game of the season, but that's the way it bounces sometimes - since we start with pretty close to LAST year's rankings, and college teams CHANGE more from year to year than professionals do, it takes a few weeks for our tiers to adjust to the new reality. (That's why we start with such broad tiers - in fact, we probably didn't start broadly enough this season, and that's why it's taken longer to improve our accuracy.)
So this week, for the FBS games (the only ones Vegas places odds on, we were closer to the real final score on 29 games, whereas the oddsmakers managed to outperform us on only 18. (There were a handful of games where either we had the same line on a game, or we ended up equidistant from the final score - one game we had as a 13 point spread, Vegas had it at 17, and the game ended up 15. Oh well.) So we're tooting our own horn here, and we're ready to start giving you our favorite bets beforehand, probably on Thursdays or so.
By the way, with tonight left to go, we're at 6-6 on the NFL games with the professional gamblers in Vegas. (We have Carolina as a 13 point favorite over Tampa, and the oddsmakers are more willing to take Cam's absence into account with a six-point spread.) We do NOT mess with the raw numbers - if Cam's out, so what? We've learned that we're better off not second-guessing the original FOLLOWING FOOTBALL computer system!
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