We have a full weekend of college football in front of us, with some MAC-tion starting tonight. Given the number of games, I broke the sample into four dashboards this week, Tues-Fri, Saturday Early, Saturday Midday, and Saturday Evening and Late. These dashboards illustrate the college football watchability index, which highlights the most- and least- (if there could ever be such a thing with college football) watchable games of the week. The absolute value of the point spread is on the horizontal axis and this represents a measure of uncertainty of outcome. Lower point spreads, in absolute value terms, are expected to be closer games. The total (over/under) is plotted on the vertical axis, with higher totals representing games that are expected to be higher scoring. The shape of the point representing each game represents day and start time. The color of the point is differentiated by the use of Sagarin Ratings for each team and sums them for the two teams playing in the game. Gold represents a combined high sum (could be 2 good teams or a dominant team in the game) and Red represents a combined low sum (not among the better teams playing in the game).
For the Tuesday-Friday games, Purdue-Minnesota is the best matchup, expected to be close and relatively high-scoring. Other good matchups in the upper-left hand quadrant include MAC games featuring Western Michigan-Central Michigan, Toledo-Eastern Michigan, and Northern Illinois-Ball St. Although expected to be slightly lower-scoring, the Tulane-Tulsa game on Thursday also looks to be interesting.
On early Saturday, Houston-SMU, LSU-Arkansas, and Wake Forest-Duke look to be high-scoring competitive affairs. The best game at this timeslot, despite the relatively high point spread, is the Indiana-Ohio St. game with playoff implications. An extremely important Sun Belt game is also at this time, with Coastal Carolina hosting Appalachian State. Midday Saturday features a couple of close, but relatively low-scoring (expected) games between Wisconsin and Northwestern and Iowa and Penn St. Games at this time that are expected to be more high scoring, but still close, feature some intriguing matchups between Cincinnati and Central Florida and Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh.
The evening and late-night games on Saturday have some great games located in the upper-left hand quadrant in USC-Utah and Oklahoma State-Oklahoma. Also, in the upper-left hand quadrant is Liberty looking to continue their magical season on the road at NC State. Despite a higher point spread, there could be considerable fireworks between UCLA and Oregon as well.
I look forward to this week’s games and hope you have a chance to enjoy them as well.
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