ELO is a rating system originally developed for chess that measures the relative skill level of teams. In college football, it provides a more accurate ranking than traditional polls by empirically considering strength of schedule.
Teams start each season with ELO ratings based on their previous year's final ELO ratings, regressed 5% towards the mean of 1500. New teams or teams without history start at 1500.
Every spread is points the home team is favoured by. A positive difference means the model likes the home team more than the book did.
Average miss against the final margin over the games currently filtered; lower is better. Cumulative runs the mean from week 1 forward, so every game counts once and the line converges — bowl weeks carry one or two games against a September Saturday's fifty, and a per-week average plots those as equals. Per week shows each week alone, which is the view for when a stretch went wrong rather than how the season stands. Each book is scored only on the games it opened, so its line covers a different set from the model's; a week a book quoted nothing is a gap per week and holds its running mean cumulatively.
| Wk | Date | Matchup | Elo | Pre-market | Bovada | DraftKings | ESPN Bet | Consensus | Difference | Result |
|---|
Two different bars, and they usually disagree. Miss is the average distance from the final margin — who forecast better. Against the spread takes the book's opening number as the line, bets whichever side the model prefers, and counts covers; a bet at the usual −110 price needs 52.4% to break even, not 50%. Every season this data covers is shown, so a single strong cell can be read against the twelve others rather than on its own.
| Season | Book | Games | Elo miss | Book miss | Difference | Against the spread | Cover rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Bovada | 750 | 14.06 | 12.67 | -1.39 | 360–376–14 | 48.9% |
| 2021 | Consensus | 750 | 14.06 | 12.67 | -1.39 | 360–376–14 | 48.9% |
| 2022 | Bovada | 759 | 13.89 | 12.09 | -1.79 | 357–384–17 | 48.2% |
| 2022 | Consensus | 759 | 13.89 | 12.09 | -1.79 | 357–384–17 | 48.2% |
| 2023 | Bovada | 779 | 13.58 | 12.36 | -1.22 | 367–399–13 | 47.9% |
| 2023 | DraftKings | 717 | 13.47 | 12.18 | -1.29 | 345–358–14 | 49.1% |
| 2023 | Consensus | 781 | 13.58 | 12.32 | -1.26 | 379–397–5 | 48.8% |
| 2024 | Bovada | 785 | 14.34 | 12.19 | -2.15 | 369–398–18 | 48.1% |
| 2024 | DraftKings | 690 | 14.51 | 12.51 | -2.01 | 333–350–7 | 48.8% |
| 2024 | ESPN Bet | 750 | 14.35 | 12.17 | -2.18 | 344–396–10 | 46.5% |
| 2024 | Consensus | 788 | 14.39 | 12.28 | -2.11 | 374–409–5 | 47.8% |
| 2025 | Bovada | 808 | 13.71 | 11.88 | -1.83 | 402–392–14 | 50.6% |
| 2025 | DraftKings | 667 | 13.67 | 11.86 | -1.81 | 345–318–4 | 52.0% |
| 2025 | ESPN Bet | 756 | 13.69 | 11.88 | -1.82 | 387–366–3 | 51.4% |
| 2025 | Consensus | 808 | 13.71 | 11.85 | -1.85 | 409–392–7 | 51.1% |
| All seasons | Bovada | 3881 | 13.91 | 12.23 | -1.68 | 1855–1949–76 | 48.8% |
| All seasons | DraftKings | 2074 | 13.88 | 12.19 | -1.70 | 1023–1026–25 | 49.9% |
| All seasons | ESPN Bet | 1506 | 14.02 | 12.02 | -2.00 | 731–762–13 | 49.0% |
| All seasons | Consensus | 3886 | 13.92 | 12.24 | -1.69 | 1879–1958–48 | 49.0% |
Read the whole table before any one row of it. The model's miss is larger than the book's in every season against every book, and the cover rate sits within a couple of points of a coin flip. Thirteen book-seasons are on screen; at that many, one or two landing above the break-even line is what chance alone produces, and no cell here is far enough from 50% to survive being the best of thirteen. The market correction improved every one of these figures and changed none of these conclusions — which is what MODEL-60 measured when it was fitted, and what it still says here.
Every number is points the home team is favoured by, so the book's own sign is flipped. Neutral-site games have no home team and are listed alphabetically, marked “(N)”. Opening spreads come from CFBD and exist from 2021: Bovada from 2021, DraftKings from 2023, ESPN Bet from 2024.
The Elo column is the model as the site serves it, including the market correction as it stood going into that week — never a later one, and never this game's own line. Pre-market is the same prediction without that correction: what the rating system knows without consulting the market at all. The correction is fitted to pull predictions toward the market, so it shrinks the Difference column by construction; the pre-market number is the one to read as independent. Neither affects the scoreboard above, which is scored against what actually happened. A team's first game of a season is never corrected, in any week — the term reads games already played and there are none yet, which is why September stays the model's weakest stretch and cannot be fixed from here.