About Blue Chip Analytics

Our Mission

Blue Chip Analytics is all about helping college football fans, bettors and aspiring analysts understand the data of college football. In our experience, most people start their data journey by building a personal power ranking - which is great - but it is not the whole picture. Far more goes into a game line (or spread) and by sharing our data and tools we hope to help you understand what’s likely to impact a given game or result. We share all our data for free, and when our research is complete we’ll share that too.

Why Are We Doing This

There are some great college football resources out there and we hope we can add to the ecosystem for CFB fans with our free college football weather forecasts, CFB power rankings, home field advantage data for every team and line value calculator for all NCAA FBS games.

How It Works

1. The Weather

The weather is one of the major factors in sports, but its effect is often misunderstood. Many college football bettors do not pay attention to the weather at all, and those who do often over simplify with sweeping rules of thumb, like, “always bet the under in the snow”. We can help you find value with stadium-specific weather forecasts.

We start with our own database of FBS teams and stadiums. We get game data from CollegeFootballData - the first place anyone with an interest in CFB Data should start. We then use various weather APIs to pull the forecast for the hour of the game at the exact location of the stadium. As the forecast updates throughout the week we publish the changes.

2. Line Value Calculator

These days it seems everyone has a power rating (or ranking) and this is a great place to start your journey. But in our experience, few if any bettors produce power ratings that are more accurate than the industry big hitters such as Bill Connely (SP+) and Kelley Ford (KFORD). Kudos to those gentlemen for making their ratings, and not just rankings, available. That does not mean you shouldn't produce your own - we encourage you to make the effort - but if you are looking to make better decisions you might get more bang for your buck by taking a step back.

Questioning why a line does not exactly match power ratings differential is a great way to understand the factors expected to impact a game. That’s where our simple and free Line Value calculator comes in. You start with our Blue Chip Analytics power rating, the betting line (ATS) and can adjust all the macro factors that might impact a game. These include home field advanatage for every college football team, stadium elevation, travel distance, body clock at kick off and college football weather forecasts (updated daily).

3. Consensus Power Rating

This is an experiment. The idea is along the same lines as the wisdom of crowds. If enough college football fans, analysts and bettors predict the line in enough hypothetical games, can we back out an accurate power rating?

We are working on a white paper to explain the mathematics behind this idea, but until we get enough submissions it will remain hypothetical.

4. Blue Chip Analytics Power Rating

This is conceptually no different to any other Power Rating, but to avoid confusion, when the BCA Power Rating is referenced on this site it is not the Consensus Power Rating described above.