College football, Week 4: Schedule, TV listings, S&P+ picks

Time for everybody’s favorite game, What Did Bill F*** Up This Week? A couple of weeks ago, it was forgetting to apply an early-season range of points, resulting in far more blowout projections than are customary for Week 1. This time around, I screwed up the stat profiles.

I spent a good portion of Sunday tweaking and fixing the box score structure that you now find in each stat profile. I’m really excited about the box scores, and they should be pretty easy to maintain moving forward, but these first couple of weeks, they’ve been a bit of a burden to set up. And because of this distraction, I forgot to update the projections to account for the new S&P+ data. The projections you see for upcoming weeks in the profiles are based on Week 2 S&P+ data, not Week 3.

For most teams, this doesn’t create too much of a difference. But if you’re looking at your team’s profile, and then you look at the S&P+ projections below, you’ll find differences. (Unless you’re looking at ACC profiles, at least. I updated those for today’s SB Nation piece.) That is because, as always, I am perpetually absent-minded ... and there’s very little about this weekly process that is automated.

Anyway, here are this week’s picks. Last week was a struggle for S&P+ — the average error in the projections didn’t change hardly at all from Week 2 to Week 3, but the luck flipped, and S&P+ went just 24-29-2. (F/+, meanwhile, went 28-25-2. And here’s your reminder that F/+ is the combination of my S&P+ and Brian Fremeau’s FEI.) Alas, we soldier on.

Once again, here is the google doc with this year’s picks in them. You can find F/+ on the far right.

Some particularly interesting projections:

• Ole Miss by 9 (S&P+) and 3 (F/+) over Georgia. Pretty big range of disagreement here, and the spread (OM -7) is right in between. We’ll learn a lot about Ole Miss’ resilience in this one.
• Florida by 1 over Tennessee (S&P+). S&P+ is in love with Florida’s defense at the moment, and the thought of the Gator defensive line against the Vol offensive line should give just about anyone pause. But this is still ... a pretty aggressive projection considering the “Vols -6.5” line.
• Florida State by 11 over USF (F/+). This game has prime upset potential, but both S&P+ and F/+ are holding steady with the increasingly banged up Noles for now.
• Buffalo by 2 over Army (S&P+). S&P+ has been very slow to warm to the Black Knights despite three straight double-digit wins.
• South Carolina by 5 over Kentucky (S&P+). S&P+ says this is the second-most winnable game left on the schedule for UK. Lose this one, and Mark Stoops might be unemployed by October.
• Washington by 17 over Arizona (S&P+). First chance for Washington to really prove something.