Adam Burke shares his weekly college football power ratings
College football has a lot of layers once you get into late October. Finding injury information is remarkably difficult without standardized reporting and we’re reaching that time of the year where a lot of players are banged up. Quarterback and skill-position injuries may make it to the news, or it will be reported if a top prospect on defense is on the trainer’s table a lot, but we generally aren’t getting a ton of information.
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Another thing that we deal with at this time of the season is trying to figure out which teams and players are still invested and which ones aren’t. Now that we’re into Week 9, the goals that teams set out prior to the season could be unattainable. Some will be fighting for bowl eligibility. Some will be fighting to keep a coach’s job. Others may not be going that hard in hopes of keeping the current regime.
As edges dry up and the market becomes more efficient, some of these less intangible things feature more prominently in the handicapping. For example, look at USC. Their hopes of winning the Pac-12 and going to the College Football Playoff appear to be dashed. Caleb Williams won’t win the Heisman again. How invested will he be the rest of the way? This isn’t a knock on his character and I don’t know him, but as an outsider, it’s a question that has to be asked, right?
Are the teams with six or seven losses like Kent State, Ball State, East Carolina, UAB, UTEP, and the like going to be all that engaged the rest of the way? Making it to a bowl game is fun. You get to play on ESPN. You get a swag bag. You get to travel somewhere. Those hopes are either fully dashed or almost dashed.
South Carolina seems to have a Shane Beamer problem. While the program is probably committed to him, the players and the other coaches may not be, as he keeps passing blame around his press conferences. Dabo Swinney seems to have a major problem with OC Garrett Riley. These things leak over onto the field and become performance issues.
As my lines have tightened up and as my numbers are much closer to the market, those are things that I have to think about and consider, along with trying to figure out where teams are having cluster injuries or depth concerns. There are a lot more factors coming into handicaps now that we either can’t see or can’t quantify, which means that we have to change what we value and what we don’t just a little bit.
Here are my Week 9 College Football Power Ratings:
