We have released our 3 RECOMMENDED Plays for Week 1. As we have been saying all week, we really like the early model alignment that we are seeing! We could have easily pulled the trigger on 10 games this weekend, but if you know us at all, you know we walk the conservative trail. Therefore, we will be releasing 4 FREE plays for the weekend as well (including 1 on tonight’s game).

Games as follows:
(2) #2 Recommended Plays – Saturday (7PM – (Oklahoma State (-17) click for the geeksheet) & Cincinnati (+3) click for the geeksheet)
(1) #3 Recommended Play – Sunday - (ECU (+7) Click for the geeksheet)

Sign up now, if you haven’t already. We are really excited about this year, and spent more time this off-season than we ever have in the past.

If you want the free plays, be sure to enter your email above.

Wager Wisely!

The Geek

We have been looking at Week 1 for about a month now, and all we can say is- WOW! What a start to the season, there are 14 pretty decent games, if you get picky 5-8 really good ones.

We are going to start whittling down by nuking games with questionable coaching situations, Qbs, think OL/DL, etc…but I don’t recall a week 1 with this sort of alignment, kind of scary. You know us, we are as conservative as they come, but the models are all agreeing, and I’m liking what I’m seeing.

Be sure to get on board before Friday to get in on the action. If you sign up for a SEASON PACKAGE before Week 2, you will get the Bowl Season for free.

Wager Wisely,

The Geek

We only have a few more days until college football kickoff.  We’ve got a few plays for this weekend, so go ahead and sign up, to get in on the action!  If you sign up for a SEASON Package before Week 2, you will receive the Entire Bowl Season for FREE!  Sign up HERE.

Below you’ll find our projections for each SEC team and how that compares to their actual performance last season.  We have two separate projections that we run each off season to predict how a team should perform this upcoming season compared to last season based on a myriad of factors that include stability in the coach staff, returning letterman, returning starters by position, pre-season all Americans, all-conference, percentage of rushing and receiving yards returning, etc.  The analysis is broke down into offensive and defensive projections as well as the net differential (Total Offense – Total Defense).  Not surprisingly UF and Alabama topped that net differential chart last year as well as this year.  From there are projections support most of the consensus projections with Auburn and Arkansas basically a coin flip for #2 in the West and UGA and South Carolina in virtually the same situation in the East.

This is a pretty rudimentary analysis for projecting final results as scheduling becomes a huge factor, particularly in the SEC.  Auburn has a really favorable away schedule drawing the Mississippi’s, Kentucky, and Alabama on the road, as well as avoiding UF in the east rotation.  Arkansas also has a pretty favorable draw avoiding UF in the east, but has difficult road games at South Carolina, UGA, and Auburn.  For that reason we’ll give the Tigers the nod as #2 in the West.  The rest of the West is a bit of a crap shoot, but I do think this will ultimately be Les Miles swan song in Baton Rouge as the Bayou Bengals will grossly underperform again this year, and with the Jeremiah Masoli wildcard in Ole Miss and what appears to be an improving coaching staff in Starkville it might get really ugly for The Hat.  I’ll call for LSU #4, Ole Miss #4, and Miss St #6 but think those teams are a lot closer than people give the Mississippi’s credit for.

I am also going to nod with UGA as the #2 slot in the East, mainly because South Carolina draws the top 3 West teams (Alabama, Arkansas, and Auburn), as well as having to travel to Florida.  UGA has a much more favorable draw with road games at Miss St, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Auburn and doesn’t have to face Alabama.  Who knows what to make of the balance of the east, but if I am a betting man I’d put my money on a long road back to prosperity for Tennessee compared to a quick bounce back for the younger Dooley.  I think Kentucky will continue to perform well, and has a pretty decent draw with both the Mississippi schools and Auburn in the east, and gets UGA, South Carolina, and Auburn all at home.  The season finale at Tennessee could ultimately determine who finishes #4.   I’ll Lean with UK #4, UT #5, and Vandy as the cellar dweller.

I think we are in for a pretty exciting year, and with Bama facing a pretty tough road schedule (at Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and LSU) as well as the mid-season UF show down I don’t think it is a cinch for them to win the West (although they are certainly the favorite).  I do think UF cruises in the east, with their only other SEC road games being at Tennessee and Vandy.  In the end I’ll call for UF to beat Bama in Atlanta, and for both teams to be in the National Championship hunt late into the season regardless of who wins the regular season showdown.

Offense

Defense

Net Differential (Total Offense – Total Defense)

Be sure to get on board before next Thursday!

Click below for the excel spreadsheet of all D-1 offensive and defensive 2010 projections:

TheGeekSheet 2010 Projections

TheGeekSheetSports.com was founded in 2003. We are dedicated solely to handicapping College Football. It’s 100% of our focus, 52 weeks a year. It’s what we do and we are the best on the net!

COLLEGE FOOTBALL IS ALMOST HERE. SIGN UP NOW AND GET READY TO BEAT THE SPREAD – EVERYWEEK!!!!

This year marks our 6th season of The Geek Sheet Sports, and our lifetime record of 255-155-9 (62%) is as good as you will find out there. We’ve only had one season below 0.500, and over half have finished north of 65%, an accomplishment we are extremely proud of. Our system is predicated on a statistical analysis of past performance, and as such typically hits its stride around week 4-5 when we have 3-4 games of good data on each team. We are always looking for ways to improve our system and after a couple years of testing we rolled out an early season statistical modification last season that really improved our early season performance. We’ve made further refinements to that his off season and our looking forward to really hitting the ground running this year!

We do things a little differently around here, so take some time to review some of our posts regarding wager guides, our philosophy, past results, and listen to some of our web-casts. I hope you find things informative and more than anything 100% transparent. Football handicapping is a lot science, a little art, and a lot of things that are outside your control. We pride ourselves on our honesty and integrity. There is no way we can tell you what is going to happen. What we promise to always do is tirelessly research and report on what we think will happen and more importantly why. Handicapping can be extremely lucrative with the proper approach and attitude, more importantly, it should be fun! So take the proper approach to money management, understand the risks, what you do and do not control, and have fun with it! Otherwise we can all go try and mint our millions arbitraging spreads off Sovereign Debt…that sounds exciting…and certainly completely within our control!

Instead of focusing on picking winners by searching out trends and angles, I shifted my focus to accurately determining what the score should be. I refined models which focus on those games with the highest level of reliability in those predictions, then identify which of those games have the largest variance from the current betting line.

I surmised that if I could devise a system to chart the accuracy of these forecasts, I could (relatively speaking) accurately assess the odds of my predictions proving out (when combined with large variances in the lines produces winners).

After identifying those opportunities, we then evaluate where the line values are. We don’t ignore situation analysis, trends, angles, or even common sense. But we make the above assessment the foundation of our research, from which we then focus on the specifics of the game.

We have found this approach to be extremely successful, and are constantly working to refine our methods, and analyze what makes up acceptable alignment of models and variances from line based on the lines themselves.

Click below to see the GEEKSHEETS:

• UConn – #3 Recommended Play – W
• UAB – #3 Recommended Play – L
• SMU – #4 Recommended Play – W
• ULM – #2 Recommended Play – L
• Hawaii – #2 Recommended Play – W

Idaho lost to Boise 63-25 (as a 31.5 pt underdog), despite somehow outgaining Boise 514-498 as a 31 pts underdog, including a 399-303 advantage at half (so it wasn’t like it was poured on late hen the game was over).  Boise benefited from 5 INT, 2 Fumbles, a 100 YD Kick Return for TD, an INT for TD, and a Fumble and INT on the 1^st two possessions that set up scoring drives of 15 and 31 yards for Boise.  I can’t even fathom how a 30 pt dog outgains a team like that and it took nearly every bad break listed above for them to lose by 38.  Take away either the 100 YD kick return (w/ 27 seconds left to go before half) or the INT returned for a TD and we cover, although this certainly should have been much closer.

North Texas outgains FIU 513-258…that is 3 yards from lapping the team they where a 3 pt underdog to, but an INT returned for a TD, a blocked punt, and a NTU fumble all in the 2^nd half allowed FIU to overcome a 28-14 halftime deficit.  And to add insult to injury, NTU had an opportunity to tie the game and send it to OT, driving to inside the FIU 10 with 2 minutes to go before a TO on downs.

We had very solid Ws with Syracuse (7pt dog) who nearly one outright (UL scored with 1:27 remaining), correctly called for the Straight up Stanford W (as a 10 pt dog), and Utah State W 24-9.  Rutgers, ULM, and Duke weren’t so good, BC could have gone either way (W or L) so was probably fair to get a Push,  and got totally jobbed on the NTU and Idaho games.

3-5-1 isn’t good, but it definitely should have been 5-3-1, no worse than 5-4 and with some luck could have been 6-3 (depending on a break or two in the BC game).  We are now a disappointing 33-36-2 and an amazing 2-17-2 in good luck/bad luck games.  We’ve been correct in our analysis in 49 of 71 games or 69% of the time (33 W – 2 Good Luck Ws + 17 Bad Luck Ls + 1 Push=49).  So in any normal year where the good breaks and bad breaks would even out we’d be doing great (69% with 50-50 split of good luck to bad luck), and even with some parity in the luck would not only have a winning record, but would be pretty close to our historic record of 62% (248-152-9).

1. #2 recommended play TAMU (-3):  TAMU was up 21-10 at half (which should have been more as they had a TAMU turnover on downs at the 1 yard line on the 1^st drive of the game), and up 6 with 3 minutes to go in the game despite a 2^nd half that included 1 missed FG and two stalled drives in the red zone that settled for FGs (one of which on the 3 yd line).

1. #3 recommend play Army (+17):  AF wins 35-7 despite only 292 yards (of which 75 came on one play).  The game was 7-7 with AFs only points coming via a punt return TD, long pass play (75yd) and some really unfortunate short field possessions  (AF gained 4.7 yppl which if you take out the one long pass play was much worse, 3.6 yppl), which is very close to our projections of 262 yds @ 4.0 yppl. Army gained 236 ypds (4.0 yppl) which is actually better than the 213 (3.7 yppl) we projected.  To give you a sense of how unusual 35 pts on just 292 yds  total offense is, here are the production of a couple other of our recommended plays this week:
   1. SJSU: 7 pts – 258 yds (4.9 yppl)
   2. UNC: 19 pts – 311 yds (3.9 yppl)
   3. Oklahoma -3 pts – 325 yds (3.7 yppl)

Oklahoma should have had a little more (probably close to 13-17), but all in all I think it is pretty obvious our analysis was correct, and we were on the right side, just horribly unlucky

1. #4 recommend play Duke (+10)- we were in great shape with a 6-6 score late in the 3^rd quarter before this comedy of errors occurred:
   1. Duke picks off UNC returning it to the UNC 37, looking good to go up at least 9-6 heading into the 4^th quarter.  2 plays later Duke throws a pick that is returned to the INT sets up 20, 3 and out later – UNC FG and 9-6 UNC lead to end the 3^rd quarter…at minimum a 6 point swing
   2. Duke TO on downs at the UNC 41 which leads to a TD
   3. UNC Punt return to the Duke 28 yard line which leads to a FG with less than 4 minutes to go in the game to push it over the 10 pt total.

We feel very confident in our analysis of this game, and that we were on the correct side and with any justice should have been up 9-6 heading into the 4^th.

1. We did get a little fortunate in the Nebraska game as their O struggled much more than we anticipated, however the D held up as we suspected.  OU missed 3 FGs, although all 3 where 40+ attempts with 2 of the 3 being from 45+ so they were anything but certain.  OU also had 5 Int, however 3 of them occurred in the 4^th Q w/ Nebraska already up 10-3.  The two other INTs set up Nebraska on short field leading to their 10 points, but to be fair Nebraska also fumbled the ball on the OU 21 which effectively erased at least 3 maybe 7 points as well, so the net effect of TOs wasn’t as bad as one might think.

Depending on whether or not you think we were lucky in the Nebraska game our record in bad luck / good luck games is now a nearly impossible to believe 2-15-1 (or 1-16-1).  With a record of 30-31-1that means we’ve been correct in our analysis of 46 (or 47) of 62 games which is right at 74%, yet just below .500 in the outcomes.  Presuming that luck, by definition, is random we should expect to be the beneficiary of good luck as frequently as the bad luck, which has clearly not been the case.  Even if you just took away half of our bad luck losses (which would still be just 2-8-1 on bad luck/good luck games), we’d be 37-31-1 or a respectable 54%.  If the luck was truly equitable we’d be .500 in our good luck/ bad luck games (effectively meaning we’ve suffered 13 too many losses / pushes) and a very solid record of 43-19 or 69%.
All that said, luck evens out in the long run, and our historical record (5 years) of 245-147-8 (63%) attests to that fact, and the validity of our methods.  Also, considering the bad breaks this year (basically 25% of our total games), to be .500 is actually a pretty accomplished feat (if you do the mathematics of starting -25% in the whole based on correct analysis and assessments validated by the performance).

EMU looks to really struggle in nearly all our projections (258-306 total yards), yet projects 19 or 25 in 100% of our models.  That doesn’t really fit with that sort of offensive production, and given the ambiguity in model alignment and lack of value we’ll pass.

We are set to release our RECOMMENDED PLAYS tomorrow night around 5PM EST.  Last week we should have been 5-2 on our recommended plays, but settled for 4-3, at the end of the day.  We were dead-on with most of our projections, and really feel good about the plays this weekend!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PROJECTIONS FOR THE EASTERN MICHIGAN @ NORTHERN ILLINOIS GAME

This is definitely a game that we will PASS ON.  There will be bigger fish to fry this weekend!  We’ve been looking at the cards for the past 3 days, and feel that we may have some really  strong plays this weekend.

Click here to see the offensive projections as well as projected points for tonight’s matchup.

Click here to sign up for the weekend’s plays!  We’ve updated our SEASON subscription.  Sign up this week and get the rest of the year of College Football, including the bowl games.