The weekly variance in college football feels higher than ever before. Maybe it’s just a giant helping of recency bias, but the week-to-week performances feature a lot of head-scratchers, don’t they? That’s why box score study is so important, not only to find out what happened in the game, but find out who played in the game.
This past week, we had a bunch of replacement quarterbacks in the Group of Five ranging from “we thought it was possible” to “this is the first we’re hearing of this”. Most college coaches shy away from sharing injury information, especially with programs that don’t have a lot of people on the beat. Bettors find out some of this inside intel and you’ll see line moves, but the average bettor isn’t going to have any idea and then may make some incorrect judgments based on the results.
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Todd Centeio of James Madison, Collin Schlee of Kent State, James Blackman of Arkansas State and Cooper Legas of Utah State were among the quarterbacks that missed games last week for teams that failed to cover the spread. Those weren’t the only ones, but those were three that did create some line movement in the market. James Madison wound up going 0-for-17 on third down. Kent State never came close to covering against Akron with a true freshman at QB. Utah State was inept offensively against Wyoming in a game that also featured wind.
These weren’t the first and won’t be the last, but it is critically important to know whether or not a starting quarterback played in the game and how much of it he actually played before you start looking at results and reading too much into them. Of course, then you also have to keep in mind that those signal callers might be out again.
I’ve also mentioned this multiple times already, but the dispersal of talent across the country thanks to how easy it is to transfer has really created a lot of parity, particularly in the Group of Five. The elites are still the elites in the Power Five conferences, but we’ve even seen a lot of Jekyll-and-Hyde performances from middle-tier teams in those leagues. It’s just the reality that we live in.
Here are my Week 9 Power Ratings:
