Our long wait is over! The 2022 college football season has arrived and brings with it seven FBS vs. FBS matchups in “Week 0”. In total, we get 11 games this week, as four teams will play those “paycheck” games against FCS schools that need to fill the athletic department coffers. Early-season games can certainly be sloppy and a bit crazy, but we have football back and that’s what matters.
For the last several seasons, I’ve put together my own set of college football power ratings. I outlined my process last month in the College Football Betting Guide (subscribe if you haven’t gotten it) and followed that up with how I came up with my home-field advantage values for this season. I’d recommend referring to those two free articles before reading on.
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Power ratings have the most value early in the week. Handicapping techniques have more value late in the week – weather, spots, matchup advantages, etc. Power ratings are designed to help you try and beat the market by making good bets with closing line value (CLV). The best indicator of future success in any market is to get the best number you can relative to the closing number. If you can get -6, but wait and then take -7.5 later in the week, that’s not the way to approach this. While -7.5 may still win, there will be times when the game lands 7 and you turned a winner into a loser by not betting early in anticipation of a line move.
As a result, the mark of a good set of power ratings is to have more market lines move towards your spread than away from it. If that doesn’t happen, that’s when bigger adjustments to the teams need to be made.
My goal is for this exercise to provide an educational and informational tool. This is to show those who want to create their own spreads one way to do it and also a way of helping bettors to not overreact as the season goes along. Power ratings serve as a system of checks and balances if updated properly and will keep you grounded with your opinions. I certainly hope we can get some good numbers and winning bets as well.
For now, here is my 1 through 131 list of Week 0 Power Ratings:
