Diving into the advanced stats can be a great way to get more informed about college football and spot some potential betting trends and value before they fully emerge. Better yet, it can make you feel more knowledgeable about the college football landscape as a whole. Let's jump into the sea of advanced stats and see what we can find. Keep underestimating Florida Gators at your own peril
I'm used to getting yelled at when I release each week's SP+ rankings (hello, Clemson fans, this week's most ... vocal critics). But over the past few weeks, I kept getting reactions I found confusing: variations of "I just don't understand what SP+ sees in Florida."
To be sure, sometimes SP+ is slow to warm or cool to a certain team. That it still ranks Mississippi State 30th is a bit of a surprise to me, as is the fact that Cincinnati still is barely a top-40 team. It's not going to perfectly nail every team's status, and that's fine.
Florida, though?
The Gators were doing just fine against the spread. They came up three points short of covering against Miami, thanks primarily to bad luck with fumbles; they pushed against Kentucky in a strange, backup QB-laden game; and they covered with ease against Tennessee.
They were one of the most reliable teams from the perspective of SP+ projections too: The average absolute error (the average of the difference, positive or negative, between projected and final margins) in Florida games was just 5.6 points per game. Anything under about 13 is pretty good, and anything under 7 is great.
I guess I wasn't totally surprised by the confusion. I did watch the Florida-Miami game, in all its sloppy glory, after all. I'm guessing that the sloppiness, quarterback Feleipe Franks' injury (replacement Kyle Trask has been nearly as efficient and less error-prone) and two games against FCS competition (the "ain't played nobody" factor) all factored in. But there's a difference between bad sloppy and beneficial sloppy, and if we can trust any program to figure out how to differentiate itself in that way, it's one that once was coached by Will Muschamp.
Regardless, heading into last week's game against Auburn, SP+ had the Gators projected as a 2.3-point favorite, and it initiated yet another round of "Are you sure? What does SP+ see in them?" I was struggling to answer with anything better than, "They're good, and they're at home."
It's safe to say, the Gators got their vindication on Saturday. They made Auburn quarterback Bo Nix look like the freshman he is, Trask completed some big passes on passing downs and while neither team was all that efficient, only one (Florida) made any big plays. The game was sloppy once more (Gators defensive coordinator Todd Grantham likes it that way), and Florida prevailed 24-13.
This is an imperfect team, to be sure. The run game is dramatically all-or-nothing -- Lamical Perine's game-clinching, 88-yard score was spectacular, but Florida backs otherwise gained 61 yards on 19 carries -- and that puts a lot of pressure on Trask, a banged-up career backup. But SP+ ranks the Gators fifth on defense, 13th on special teams and a not-awful 32nd on offense. It also gives them about a 1-in-4 chance of finishing 11-1 or better.
Gambling relevance: Against two SEC foes, Florida has overachieved by a combined 31 points against the number. While SP+ projects LSU to beat Florida by an average margin of 7.7 points on Saturday in Baton Rouge, the line remains around LSU -13. Can the Gators continue to provide value in this regard?
LSU's passing game is the best thing the Gators will have seen, and if the Tigers are able to complete quick strikes against Grantham's aggressiveness-first, aggressiveness-second defense, they could put a lot of points on the board. But the LSU defense is far from flawless, and Florida managed to score 24 points against both an awesome Auburn defense and a Miami D that grades out almost equally to LSU's. This could end up a shootout, but Florida could still keep up.
(And even if the LSU game gets away from the Gators, keep this overachievement in mind if they only open around -5 or so against South Carolina the next week. SP+ says Gators by 9 in that one.) This week's defining games
One of my goals in this weekly space is to spot burgeoning trends before they come all the way to the surface.
Last week, I noted that it was a defining week of sorts for the Northern Illinois Huskies, a team with as much positive recent history as anyone in the MAC, but also a team on which SP+ had already given up:
The numbers might or might not have been onto something. The Huskies did lose, 27-20, but it was a pretty fluky defeat, as they outgained the Ball State Cardinals by 119 yards and lost because of a concoction of turnovers and second-half field position. Still, the Huskies remain a ghastly 113th in SP+, and a snowball effect could happen; they're a projected underdog in four of their next five games. Can they avoid a bad-morale tailspin?
I see quite a few teams facing similarly defining games in Week 7.
BYU's 2019 schedule was pretty typical for the Cougars' indie life at this point: Start out with a run of Power 5 conference opponents, shift down to quality mid-majors, then shift further down toward less-than-quality mid-majors.
Going 2-2 in Act I was pretty good, but the Cougars lost running back Ty'Son Williams to injury in the process. Then, they started Act II by falling 28-21 at Toledo and losing quarterback Zach Wilson. (He is out indefinitely with a thumb injury.)
The season is at a tipping point now. With freshman Jaren Hall behind center, the Cougars have to go across the country to play a South Florida Bulls team that showed signs of life last week in an easy win over an overmatched UConn. The line came out around BYU -6, but SP+ considers this an almost dead-on toss-up (USF by 0.6), and that's without any sort of injured QB adjustment.
Gambling relevance: At 2-3, BYU really needs this game. The Cougs also are projected underdogs to Boise State and Utah State in the coming weeks and could easily find themselves 2-6 and listless if they don't win in Tampa. SP+ already has jumped ship and is assuming the worst too.
In 2017, Chris Creighton's Eagles beat the Big Ten's Rutgers in Week 2 and proceeded to lose their next six games before rallying. In 2018, they beat Purdue and then lost four straight. Granted, most of the teams in both losing streaks were decent, but they seem to have developed a habit of losing some focus after their power conference Super Bowl.
It's been no different in 2019. The Eagles won their third straight Big Ten game, beating Illinois by a late field goal. They then proceeded to play like garbage in a narrow win over Central Connecticut and get their doors blown off, 42-16, by Central Michigan.
Gambling relevance: In two games, the Eagles fell from 93rd to 116th in SP+, and now they're at least a slight projected underdog over their next four games. Early lines have them as a slight home underdog to Ball State this week, something that would have been unfathomable as little as three weeks ago. (SP+ agrees: Ball State by 1.7.)
In both 2017 and 2018, Eastern Michigan eventually rebounded, winning three of four to nearly salvage a bowl bid in 2017 and winning five of six to reach 7-5 last fall. But they don't have a lot of time to waste here: If they indeed lose the next four, it would require them to win their final three.
FSU isn't falling into a potential crisis like BYU or EMU; instead, Week 7 will provide us a chance to see just how much the Seminoles seem to be rebounding. After losing a tight game at Virginia to fall to 1-2, they both won and covered in their next two games against Louisville and NC State. The passing game grew more efficient with the insertion of transfer Alex Hornibrook at quarterback, and the defense finally found a pulse.
The early-season SP+ ratings for FSU were nuts -- 47.6 adjusted points per game on offense (ninth overall) and 43.1 per game on defense (109th). And now they appear far more stable: 35.9 on offense (22nd) and 30.4 on defense (78th). Overall, the Seminoles were 56th two weeks ago, and now they are 45th.
Of course, this improvement came against Louisville and NC State, two talented but extremely flawed teams. Now comes a trip to face the Clemson Tigers. The defending national champs had a bye week to stew over their near loss to North Carolina, and there's a chance they come out with a little more focus than they've shown thus far.
Gambling relevance: If the Clemson team we've seen so far shows up, though, this could be an interesting contest. Mind you, Clemson will win; SP+ says they're a 21.3-point favorite, and Las Vegas has gone more toward Clemson -26. But FSU is doing an excellent job of preventing chunk plays, and with Clemson's intermediate passing game struggling, the Noles could play bend-don't-break football and stick around for a while.
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Keep underestimating Florida Gators at your own peril
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