The Golden Nugget has released point spreads for a large number of college football games.  And these spreads can tell us a lot about how Vegas views these teams.  That’s because, for the most part, the spreads are consistent.

Let’s look at Ohio State, the defending national champions and a team the Golden Nugget released lines for four games. The Buckeyes are 14-point home favorites against Michigan State, 16-point road favorites against Michigan, 19-point home favorites against Penn State, and 16-point road favorites against Virginia Tech. So how good is Ohio State? Well, that depends on how good Michigan State, Michigan, Penn State, and Virginia Tech are. As it turns out, those teams aren’t half bad, so Ohio State must be really, really good. Let’s ignore the games where two of Michigan State, Michigan, and Penn State play each other (since that won’t tell us much about Ohio State), and look at the rest:

• Michigan State is a 6-point road favorite in Nebraska and a 1-point home favorite against Oregon. This would imply that Ohio State is about 9 points better than the Ducks ^[1]Michigan State would be viewed as 2 points worse on a neutral field than Oregon, while being 11 points worse than Ohio State on a neutral field., an annual college football contender.

• The only non-Big 10 game for Penn State where a line was released was Penn State -28 against Army.

• Michigan is a 33-point home favorite against UNVL, a 4-point road dog against Utah, a 14-point home favorite against Oregon State, and a 7-point home favorite against BYU. The Wolverines aren’t great, but remember that Ohio State is favored by 16 against them in Ann Arbor.

• Virginia Tech is a 9-point home favorite against Pittsburgh, a 4-point road favorite against virginia, a 9.5-point road dog against Georgia Tech, and a 6-point road dog against Miami. And, remember, a 16-point home dog against Ohio State.

But we don’t need to strain our brains trying to piece together these ratings. As I showed last year and in 2013, we can take the point spreads from each game to determine what Vegas’ implied ratings are for 70 college football teams.

The system is pretty simple: I took the point spread for each game and turned it into a margin of victory, after assigning 3 points to the road team in each game. Do this for every game, iterate the results hundreds of times ala the Simple Rating System, we can come up with a set of power ratings.

Two quick notes about the rankings.

1) These are not intended to be surprise. The methodology may be somewhat complicated, but all these ratings are intended to do is quantify public perception.

2) These are not “my” ratings. These are simply the implied ratings based on the Vegas (or, more specifically, the Golden Nugget) points spreads; nothing more, nothing less.

Below are the ratings for 70 college football teams. ^[2]Note that I excluded Marshall and Ohio University from the above table. Since each team only has their game against each other listed, we can’t draw anything from that line about those teams … Continue reading In the table below, I’ve included the number of games for which we have point spreads for each team on the far left. The “MOV” column shows the home field-adjusted average point spread for that team, the “SOS” column shows the average rating of each team’s opponents (for only the number of games for which we have lines), and the “SRS” column shows the school’s implied SRS rating. As you can see, Ohio State is projected to be the strongest team in college football.

Below are the results of the individual games. Here’s how to read the table. When Ohio State plays Michigan State, OSU is a 14-point favorite. The game is a home game for OSU, which means Ohio State’s location-adjusted expected Margin of Victory against MSU is 11. Since Michigan State has a rating of 6.3 (see the table above), that is shown in the SOS column. If we add the MOV and SOS columns, we get Ohio State’s single-game SRS score, which is 17.3. For the most part, these ratings are consistent: Ohio State’s SRS rating for each game is between 15.3 and 17.3 points.

• One of the weirdest lines out there is Miami being 6-point favorites at home against Virginia Tech. According to the SRS, the Hokies are the better team: for example, VT is a 9.5 point road dog against Georgia Tech, implying that the Hokies are 6.5 points worse than the Yellow Jackets on a neutral field. But Georgia Tech is a 6-point favorite when they play in Miami, implying that they’re 9 points better. So Virginia Tech being such a large underdog, even on the road, is weird. Of course, that line quickly dropped from -6 to -4, so betters caught on to that.

• The 2009 SEC Championship Game was a long time ago. Like, it was in 2009. Do you remember that game? The Tide upset Tim Tebow’s Florida Gators to win the SEC title en route to winning the BCS Championship against Texas. Since that game, Alabama has been favored in every single game its played. That’s 68 games, including every game in each of the last five years. The streak is going to reach 72 games, but as for now, the Alabama/Georgia game in Athens is a pick’em.