We have a full weekend of college football in front of us, with the MAC starting tonight (Wednesday) and the PAC-12 also beginning this weekend. Plenty of good games are on the docket. This dashboard is 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).
Given the large number of games, I have split the data into 4 visualizations. The first shows games played Wednesday-Friday, the second is the early games on Saturday, the third is the mid-day games on Saturday, and the last chart shows the games to be played Saturday night (evening and late).
For the Wed-Fri games, Friday’s BYU-Boise St. is the premier matchup, located in the upper-left quadrant, with other interesting games featuring Miami FL-NC St. (Friday) and Utah St.-Nevada (Thursday). For the early starts on Saturday, West Virginia-Texas looks to be a great game (lower-left quadrant), while NC-Duke and Arizona St.-USC also look to be competitive, while being a bit higher-scoring. Although in the upper-right hand quadrant (expected high-scoring but not close), the Liberty-Virginia Tech game is a great yardstick to see how good Liberty actually is as they have had a terrific season so far.
For mid-day games on Saturday, Florida-Georgia is an important and likely highly competitive game, while Oklahoma St-Kansas St. and Houston-Cincinnati are also intriguing and have important implications moving forward. For the Saturday evening and late games, Clemson-ND is the top game on the docket, likely to be much closer due to the absence of Trevor Lawrence, while Louisville-Virginia looks to be a fun game to watch due to the high amounts of scoring expected. Have a great weekend and enjoy the games!
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