College football
College football ratings and playoff odds
How this works
- Rating
- Overall team strength. One point is worth about six percentage points of win chance in a single game.
- Move
- Change in rank since last week's ratings.
- Proj W-L
- Average final record across the simulated seasons.
- Make playoff
- Share of simulated seasons in which the team made the 12-team field.
- Title odds
- The model's season simulation of the playoff and title game. Not blended with the betting market.
- Seed
- Seed by rating, as the field stands today.
- Bid
- Auto is one of the five conference automatic bids. Notre Dame, an independent, can only get in at-large.
- Average seed
- The team's average seed across the simulated seasons.
How the simulation works
The simulator plays the regular season game by game. Each result is drawn from a win chance set by the rating gap and home field, plus noise. After the regular season the field is picked and seeded, and the bracket is played out: first round on campus, then neutral sites. Thousands of simulated seasons make up each column.
Title odds
Title odds across all 138 teams add to 100%, so even a top team's share is a real lead. These are the model's own numbers and are not blended with the betting market. The homepage shows the same figures.
The DraftKings columns
DK playoff and DK title are DraftKings futures prices with the bookmaker's margin removed, refreshed weekly. Title prices are adjusted with the power method, which suits long-shot-heavy markets; playoff prices are scaled so the listed teams fill twelve spots. Where our column and theirs differ by a lot, one of us is wrong, and the season will show which.
The Model record
The Model record grades the model's own line against the closing spread on every completed game with a captured close. The coin-flip sentence under it is the chance a fair coin wins at least as many of the same games.