Prediction Methodology

Prediction Methodology

I take no credit for the predictions found here. I started ranking college football teams by hand around 1979. In the mid-1980s, I wrote a program on my trusted Commodore 64—again, just to rank the teams. In the 1990s, I began using my rankings to make game predictions with a program written in Microsoft QuickBASIC. The program eventually became so large that I had to split it in half because of memory limitations.

That program did pretty well through the years, even winning a few categories on The Prediction Tracker and frequently finishing in the Top 10. But try as I might, I could never match the performance of my old DOS program when I tried to convert the system to a spreadsheet. I never could get it quite converted but I am introducing a power rating system of predictions. This is a new method that I am trying for the first time this season. We will see how it does.

This site is primarily about the Win Rankings. I am also providing a simple consensus prediction using four or five of the best publicly available prediction systems, along with the opening betting line, which has proven to be a remarkably good predictor itself.

For each game, I discard the highest and lowest predicted margins and average the remaining three or four. That becomes the Consensus Predictions shown on this site.

The prediction systems currently used are a combination of: Line Open, Saragin, Pi Rankings Mean, Team Rankings, DRatings, ESPN FPI, Dunkel Index, and  David Harville. 

Disclaimer

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