College Football Saturday Schedule: Irish for Real?

The Pythagorean Ratings do not give Notre Dame high marks for barely surviving a UNC upset, plunging the Irish to a 17-point (39-22) underdog against Florida State Saturday in the marque game on the schedule below. Others excuse the Irish as just looking ahead, and Las Vegas will not even hazard a guess in fear of Jameis Winston being pulled from the game at the last minute.

The only other Power 5 Conference team with a non-conference game is South Carolina, which hosts Furman of the FCS. The MAC (Kent hosts Army) and MWC (Nevada visits BYU) complete the only four teams with non-conference opponents this weekend.

The scoreboard below indicates the time, opponent, and predicted result of each game this weekend. A team’s ability to exceed their projection gives them a score of +10 to -10. The big winner so far in the Thursday/Friday games was Louisiana Lafayette, which was an 5-point (23-18) underdog at North Texas but won 34-10 for a +7.1 score (+4.9 square root of actual win margin is 7.1 better than -2.2 projected square root of losing margin).

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