Week One Model Plays: Saturday

The first Saturday of college football in upon us. It's been a long "off-season" (if you can call it that), but we've made it. Let's take a look at what our Model says will happen today.

In this game of building a winning Model, we must constantly be learning. What did we learn last night? We learned a lot about Kennesaw State. That was an impressive performance, going into an ACC house and nearly coming out of there with a win. That Mitch Militello offense may take some time to get humming, but the way the defense played — outside of the opening scripted drive — was inspiring.

• We learned Army is just not anywhere close to what they were a year ago.

• We learned that ‘culture matters’ and Matt Drinkall’s Central Michigan squad had a declarative win in San Jose.

• We learned that Georgia Tech probably should have won that game in Boulder by a larger margin, and;

• We learned that Auburn is ready to make a play to get back to the upper echelon of the SEC.

We also confirmed that you never cash in a wager early, as Michigan State was ‘backdoored’ late against Western Michigan.

We will always be transparent with the results from our Model. Even when it hurts. We are not pretending this is going to break Vegas. If it ever does, you’ll probably have to pay more than the cost of a Starbucks Latte per month for access. Just warning you. However, this is really a work-in-progress and a fun way to apply all the data we are compiling at CFBDepth.com to the games themselves and see what we can come up with. We will examine the results, tinker and tweak and talk a lot about college football along the way.

Yesterday: 9-5-0 (64%)
Week 1: 18-12-0 (60%) +4 UNITS
Overall: 24-15-0 (61.5%) +5 UNITS

Let’s see if we can keep the momentum going into Saturday of week one…

Note: We rank these by ‘unit’ plays. Simply, the more ‘units’ the higher the confidence the Model is of success in that particular play.

3-UNIT PLAYS :::::

Eastern Michigan (+14) at Texas State

This one shocked me a bit when I saw the veracity by which our computer likes the Eagles getting two touchdowns. So, we have to look at the ‘Game Card’ to try to make some sense of it. Simply put. These are very similar teams talent-wise. I can also say that our computer takes quarterback play very much into account. The word out of San Marcos is that this Brad Jackson is special — but we haven’t seen a full dose of it yet. Chris Creighton and this Eagles staff are veterans and have seen Kinne’s offense enough to at least slow it down. That keeps this easily within two scores and it has the Bobcats sneaking by with a two-point win.

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California (+1.5) at Oregon State and OVER 49.5

I know, all the talk is about how much in shambles this Bears program is after Jaydn Ott, Fernando Mendoza and many of their friends left the program this offseason. There is a power struggle at the top, and head coach Justin Wilcox is always looking over his shoulder with Ron Rivera peering in with a watchful eye. I remind you that the Model doesn’t have a soul, nor does it care about all those extracurricular activities. The fact is that this coaching staff rallied nicely to bring in some replacement talent. They have underrated weapons on the outside for true freshman quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele to work with. Jacob De Jesus and Tron Grizzell are going to do enough to help the youngster get his beak wet in a hostile environment. They replaced Ott, not with one star back, but with a couple of capable dudes who are healthy (for once), in Kendrick Raphael (NC State) and LJ Johnson Jr. (SMU). The trench report shows advantages for Cal on both sides. Maalik Murphy takes over at quarterback for Oregon State, and they have some exciting players on offense over there as well. It may start a bit sleepy, but as both quarterbacks get more comfortable, we could see a high-scoring second half.

Ole Miss (-33.5) vs. Georgia State

I’m going on record with the human in me saying to stay away from this one. However, again, this Model we created doesn’t really care much about the heartbreaking Ole Miss precedent. They see, even more than a crazy talent edge for the Rebs, a lack thereof on the other sideline. If you picked up our Magazine, you’ll know that we have a lot of concerns about the talent level in Atlanta. Now, we’ll caveat that with the fact that we didn’t have a lot of data on Kennesaw State, and they came out and handled business last night. Austin Simmons looks to be the real deal and it’s also worth noting that we have him playing the entire game here. This is what the simulation gave us:

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2-UNIT PLAYS ::::::

Indiana (-23.5) vs. Old Dominion

We love us some Hoosiers over here at CFBDepth. They were our first ‘bold’ prediction last off-season, declaring them as much more talented than many know and that a big season is on the horizon. They came through, and much is made of the loss of quarterback Kurtis Rourke and some other turnover. Our numbers say that they won’t lose much (if at all ) at that all-important position with Cal-transfer Fernando Mendoza (who many pundits have as a potential first-overall pick in the NFL Draft). They were overmatched when faced with top-level competition a year ago. Old Dominion is not what we’d call ‘top level’ right now. Sure, Ricky Rahne’s squad has some exciting players, including a quarterback named Colton Joseph who put up some numbers last year in a five-game stretch late in the year. He did that primarily against the lesser Sun Belt defensive units and struggled when it came time to do so against JMU and Marshall. Throw in a head coach in Curt Cignetti who wants to leave no doubt when it comes to CFP time that they belong once again — they will not take the foot off the gas.

Texas A&M vs. UTSA OVER 56.5

Again, if you picked up our pre-season magazine leading up to the season, you’d know that we are awfully high on the potential of a bounce back season from the Roadrunners. This offense is led by a veteran quarterback and there is a lot of staff continuity down there in the 210. They will play with some pride against their big brothers in College Station and to get to this number, we really just need them to