Adam Burke shares his weekly college football power ratings
Week 3 of the college football season is uncharacteristically light on games with significant meaning, as it is a pretty weak card top to bottom. However, there are a lot of individual teams with questions to answer this week. We now have two or three data points for nearly every college football team and this is the time of year where a lot of interpretation comes into play.
There was so much emphasis placed on the difference between Week 1 and Week 2 that everybody seems to be extremely cautious about not overreacting. One game can be an outlier. Two games feels like a trend. So, what we see in Week 3 is really important. Bettors and bookmakers will completely write off and dismiss teams if they play poorly for a third straight week or really elevate the profiles of teams that shine once again.
Personally, I’m trying to thread the needle a little bit right now. There are some teams that have really impressed me and others that have done the polar opposite. I’ve made some more aggressive adjustments to my numbers this week, while also trying to keep in mind that it’s still early in the season.
Then again, with the 12-game college football schedule, teams have already played about 17% of their regular season games. That’s what makes college football tricky to handicap sometimes and certainly higher-variance than the NFL or any other major sport.
Just to refresh everybody’s memory – my process has three steps. I compare my line to the closing number, study the box score, and dig for injury intel. The box score not only includes the final score, but also looking at drive logs, turnover margin, field position, and several other factors, especially yards per play. Sometimes a team will dominate a game, but go -3 in turnovers and give up a short field or leave points out there and all of the sudden, they end up on the short end of the stick. Other times, a team won’t do much of anything, but have a defensive score or two and wind up with a misleading victory.