Adam Burke shares his weekly college football power ratings
We made it! The college football regular season begins on Saturday August 26 with seven games, which seems like a fitting number to get us going. The Week 0 card lacks marquee matchups, but does have a couple of name-brand teams in USC and Notre Dame. Also, let’s be honest, it’s real, live, meaningful football for the first time in a long time. No offense to the XFL or USFL.
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In our 2023 College Football Betting Guide (available only to VSiN Pro subscribers), I talked about my process for creating power ratings and how I use those to create my own game spreads for each week. I also talked about my home-field advantage values and how I got to those numbers. I highly encourage you to subscribe to the plan that fits your wants and needs and get that Guide, along with everything else we’ll do for college football and other sports.
Now that the season is starting, I will show my power ratings updates and detail my process on a weekly basis, including the teams I’ve moved up or down the most and the reasons why. Look for that on Sunday night/Monday morning each week.
I’ll reiterate what I’ve said the last two seasons in doing these for VSiN that power ratings are meant to be a guide. They are not gospel. They allow me to try and get some line value early in the week by jumping on spreads that I expect to move. The way to grade the efficiency of a team’s power rating is to see if the market moves towards your line when there is a difference of opinion. If it does, that’s good. If it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily bad, it just means that you may have to reevaluate one team or both teams. Sometimes a result will be closer to my power ratings. Sometimes it won’t be anywhere close. It’s all about making adjustments sooner rather than later.
I’ll detail the updating process in Week 1 and Week 2 once we get data points for the teams. For now, I’ve made a few edits prior to the season based on the betting markets, which have had ample time to settle in for Week 0 and Week 1. Lines have been up for a while, but we will still see some noteworthy line movements on game week when limits increase and people start to focus more on college football.
Here are my Week 0 College Football Power Ratings:
