Predictions 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. Running an old DOS program through DOSBox is a pain, and quite frankly, there are prediction systems today that are simply better than mine.

Couple that with the NIL/transfer-portal era making preseason rankings—and therefore early-season predictions—much more difficult, and I've decided to leave the prediction models to those smarter than me.

This site is primarily about the Win Rankings. But I enjoy predictions, and I know others do, too. So I'm 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.

We'll then see how the Consensus Predictions perform against the mid-week betting line—the line available at the time I calculate and post the week's predictions.

The prediction systems currently used are:

[Models to be named]

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