My formula predicts the rest of BYU's football games and other games in week 4

It was BYU's first road game of the season. After a lengthy weather delay, they took the field against a G5 team wearing green. BYU scored a touchdown on the second play of the game and went on to thoroughly dominate the first half. The second half was a little shaky, but BYU still won by a healthy margin.

By the way, I'm referring to the 2022 game against South Florida.

Did I getcha?

If you're as big a BYU nerd as I am, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, didn't BYU score on the first play of that game?" Technically, if you count the opening kickoff, Puka Nacua's 75-yard touchdown run against South Florida was the second play of that game, and LJ Martin's 56-yard touchdown run against Colorado St was the third play of that game. Also, you may have noticed I said G5 instead of G6 because it was still the Group of 5 in 2022. So if you still fell for it, I'm a bigger BYU football nerd than you.

Anyway, it's time for my weekly article where I use my formula to predict the rest of BYU's games plus some other games this week and do my little competition with Dick Harmon of the Deseret News.

Notably, I've made some significant changes to my formula today. In every season prior to this one, I was using the SOS rankings on teamrankings.com, but starting this year, I've been creating my own SOS rankings. The first three weeks, I was evaluating each team's strength of schedule based solely on how good my formula expected each of their FBS opponents to be before the season started with no regard to how well they've actually played, which made sense because in many cases, Team A was Team B's only FBS opponent, and I didn't want Team A's SOS to be negatively affected by Team B playing poorly... against Team A. That would mean punishing Team A for playing well.

But now that most teams have played at least two FBS opponents, I wanted Team A's strength of schedule to be affected by how well Team B played against Team C without being affected by how team B played against Team A. This required me to learn some Excel coding that I didn't know how to do before. I think I may have over-corrected a little and actually made it so Team A's SOS is positively affected by how well they play. This may explain why the point spreads are, in general, bigger than they were before. But I actually think this is an improvement. I think my predictions were too conservative before.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my formula's predictions for the rest of BYU's games:

BYU 29 TCU 23

BYU 32 Iowa St 19

Notre Dame 26 BYU 20

BYU 30 UCF 21

BYU 30 Arizona St 20

Utah 30 BYU 23

BYU 35 Baylor 20

BYU 28 Kansas 23

BYU 39 Cincinnati 20

If you read last week's article, you may notice that BYU's expected to win by more now than they were before. That's because BYU averaged a sizzling 9.6 yards per play against CSU, which gave them a significant boost. Unfortunately, though, Notre Dame and Utah both nearly tripled their opponents in total yardage in week 3, so they both got an even bigger boost, and that's why my formula says they'll both win by a bigger margin than before.

Just like last week, because my formula has BYU going 8-1 in Big 12 play, which will most likely be good enough to get them to the Big 12 title game, lets see how my formula expects them to do in the Big 12 title game. My formula currently says that Utah is the best team in the Big 12, so lets see how BYU would do against Utah on a neutral field:

Utah 28 BYU 25

Man, that stinks. I hope Lawless Republic doesn't fire me for saying BYU's going to lose to Utah twice.

Anyway, now it's time for our weekly competition with Dick Harmon where we compare our predictions from the previous week. Part of the reason I do this is because for those of us with autism, it's quirky things like this that bring us joy, and I want other people with autism to know that it's OK to do things that bring them joy regardless of whether or not they're normal.

Here are Dick Harmon's week 3 predictions. If you want to know how the scoring works, I explained it in last week's article, which is also where I put week 3's predictions. Basically, for each game, whoever got closest in terms of the point spread gets 2 points, whoever gets the closest point total gets 1 point, and there are bonuses that make some of the games worth more. Harmon led the series 2-0 going into week 3. Let's see if I can get on the board.

Before I reveal the final score, I want to clarify one point. Normally, when there's a tie, neither of us get any points. However, in the Notre Dame-Michigan St game, we both nailed the point spread at 17, and I decided getting no points for that was stupid, so I decided to give us both the points with the bonus. As long as we both get the same number of points, this doesn't affect the outcome

The final score for week 3 is:

Higinbotham 35 Harmon 31

And with that, I finally have my first win of the season. The fan has beaten the expert he grew up reading articles from. Harmon now leads the series 2-1.

Here are my formula's predictions for week 4:

Indiana 32 Northwestern 17

Baylor 29 Colorado 21

Texas Tech 44 Sam Houston 14

Texas 28 Tennessee 24

Notre Dame 39 Purdue 18

Boise St 26 Western Michigan 25

Michigan 21 Iowa 14

Florida 31 Ole Miss 29

Georgia 21 Oklahoma 17

UCF 24 TCU 22

Utah 29 Iowa St 21

Houston 35 Georgia Southern 21

Kansas St 30 Cincinnati 24

West Virginia 27 Oklahoma St 26

Arizona 27 Washington St 20

Oregon 32 USC 27

Utah St 27 Troy 17

LSU 28 Texas A&M 17

Mississippi St 29 Missouri 23

As I always say at the end of every article, remember to be kind to the officials.

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