A Much Better Start This Year
When it comes to the first couple weeks, I can usually count on one of these first few weeks to pad my stats a bit. One concept that I’ve been able to take advantage of in the past is that everyone, whether it be your brother, active Joe Gambler, the guy that writes for one of those College Football preview mags you see on the news stands at the grocery store, the fellas on ESPN, the old guy that has been going to KU football games for 55 straight seasons, everyone loves to project programs to suddenly burst into success or failure following some graduations, some new recruits and a Spring game. And the spreads move along with these sentiments. And boy do we remember the ones that do find that mobility, worst to first, first to worst, these stick around in our memories far more than the same old bad teams or same unbeatable ones do . This, my friends, is definition anecdotal evidence, and just like the political arguments you love to point out logical fallacies in, the same applies to picking early games. Most of the time, despite all the Central Florida stories you can conjure, programs do not move like the ones you remember most vividly.
But this year had it’s concerns. Of course, last year was “concerns” on steroids, but my numbers adjusted as we went along and in the end I was left feeling fairly confident that my scales had the 130 or so FBS programs with the proper digits by their names, ready to be plugged into my algorithms. But could they be wrong still? Absolutely they could. Probably not at the top, Alabama is that good, or at the bottom, UMass = yucky, but the in between had the potential to be less stable than normal times, which is why when my brothers and other K-State friends were convinced that their alma mater would be much better than any 2020 numbers would project and that my Stanford pick was a terrible one, I suspected that they were probably right about that. And they were right about that. Spot on. The way my head works, I really wish that the objective could always beat the subjective, but alas we know it does not, and along with a 58-60% winning record also come the 40-42% losers.
That being said, it would also be anecdotal to assume that everybody is K-State, that most teams finished last season in a place completely disconnected to the actual status of their programs, and even though I suspected that a fallacy is a fallacy and this would not be true, I was worried about it a little. After all, anyone surviving in today’s world could justify a little hesitancy when it comes to projecting normalcy, so my 8-7 week to start the season, while sitting at 53% and not the 58 or better that I hope to get back to, might not seem like much, to me it’s a big win, because, well, it’s a win. And I’ll take that on to the next. I’d love to get another 15 games to follow that up with, but the matchups don’t favor a lot of them this week, so here are the ones I have, all on Saturday:
Army -7 at home vs Western Kentucky
Akron +7 at home vs Temple
Air Force -5.5 at Navy
Ball State +23 at Penn State
TCU -11.5 at home vs California
Rice +8 at home vs Houston
Liberty -4.5 at Troy
Utah -7 at BYU
I am watching that Ohio State spread closely, but it doesn’t seem to be budging from the -14.5 it’s been sitting on. My system likes it at -13.5 so I’ll take it if it gets there, but I’m doubtful that it will so these are probably the eight games I’ll end up with. Happy football Saturday and good luck to your teams!
