What the words mean
the line
The spread
On every schedule row the line reads like "TCU -7.5". The minus sign marks the favorite and the number is the margin it is expected to win by; the other team is the underdog at +7.5. It is not a forecast of the final score, it is the handicap that makes the two sides an even bet. Every spread on this site comes from DraftKings and is captured before kickoff.
Favorite and underdog
The minus always attaches to the favorite, and the abbreviation in front of it names that team. "OSU -50.5" means Ohio State is favored over Ball State by 50.5 points. Where a team page shows "—" in the line column, no line has been posted for that game yet. The predictor starts every game on the favorite, so an untouched bracket is the board's opinion, not yours.
The total (over/under, O/U)
It sits after the spread on each row, and the matchup page writes it as "total 47.5". Over means the two teams together score more than that number, under means fewer. The total says nothing about who wins: a 3-0 game and a 45-42 game are the same result on the spread's opposite side but opposite results here. Blowout lines carry high totals because the favorite is expected to score a lot, as with UCF -42.5 and O/U 59.5.
Push
A 7-point favorite that wins by 7 has not covered; that is a push. The same goes for a total of 48 in a game that ends 24-24. This is why most lines carry a half point: TCU -7.5 and O/U 47.5 cannot land on the number, so they can only win or lose. Whole numbers do appear here, and they can push — Ohio State is OSU -6 against Oregon.
Cover
Covering is a separate question from winning. TCU -7.5 covers by winning by 8 or more; North Carolina at +7.5 covers by losing by 7 or fewer, and also by winning the game. A team can win and fail to cover, or lose and cover, which is the single hardest thing to hold in your head when you first read these rows.
Against the spread (ATS)
A team that goes 10-2 straight up can be 5-7 against the spread if it kept winning by less than expected. This site grades against the spread using the line it captured before kickoff and locked when the game went final. Games that never had a line are left out of the spread record entirely, and the count of them is shown. There is no line archive before this season, so every spread record here begins at 2026 Week 1.
Straight up (SU)
It is the plain result: 48-14 is a straight-up win for TCU whatever the line said. The scorecard keeps the two records apart, because a season can look strong straight up and poor against the spread. Games with no line are counted straight up only.
Captured, locked and graded
Capturing before kickoff matters because a spread moves all week; grading against the number that was showing at the end would flatter or punish a pick unfairly. A pick or a line is graded only once its game is final, and nothing counts before that in either direction. The site keeps no line archive from before this season, so all spread records start at 2026 Week 1.
the game
FBS
FBS is the level with the large stadiums, the television contracts and the College Football Playoff. Every team page, the season grid, the standings and the strength-of-schedule ranks on this site are FBS and FBS only. When a row shows a team with no link on its name, that team is outside FBS and has no page here. The "FBS vs FBS" checkbox on any week hides games against everyone else.
FCS
Football Championship Subdivision schools are smaller, carry fewer scholarships and run their own playoff. FBS teams routinely schedule one at home in September, which is why those rows carry lines like UCF -42.5 over Bethune-Cookman. FCS names on this site are plain text rather than links: there is no team page for them, and no rating either, so their whole column on a matchup page reads "no data". Forty-eight of Week 1's rows carry the tag.
the season
Conference
Conferences are the permanent structure of the sport. There is no draft and no relegation, and a team's conference decides most of its schedule, its path to a title and much of its money. This site groups nearly everything by conference: the filter on each week, the standings, the season grid, the predictor. Two FBS teams belong to none — Notre Dame and UConn are listed as FBS Independents and play no conference games at all.
Conference game
The schedule row tags it "Conf". Only conference games move the "Conf" record in the standings and the "0-0 conf" figure in a team page header. The matchup page states the difference outright: a conference game "counts in the standings that decide that league's championship game", while a non-conference game "moves both overall records but neither conference race". Ohio State plays 9 conference games and 3 non-conference.
Non-conference game
These are scheduled years in advance by the schools themselves, so they range from Ohio State at Texas to Rutgers against UMass. They shape a team's strength of schedule and its case for the playoff, but they cannot win or lose a conference title. Almost all of them fall in the first four weeks.
Neutral site
Week 1 has North Carolina against TCU at Aviva Stadium in Dublin, and Wisconsin against Notre Dame at Lambeau Field. Neither team is the home team, and team pages count home, away and neutral games separately. These rows usually carry a second tag naming the promotion — Aer Lingus College Football Classic, Aflac Kickoff — which is the event's sponsored title, not a bowl.
vs and at
On a team's schedule table and in the season grid, an opponent written "@CIN" is away and a bare "RUTG" or "vs BALL" is at home. The Site column on the team page spells it out as Home, Away or Neutral. Home field is worth points, and the predictor uses it as the tiebreak when no betting line exists.
Ranked (the number by a logo)
It appears in front of the logo on schedule rows and beside opponents on team pages. The date it comes from is printed with it, because polls move every week. Team pages count how many ranked opponents a schedule holds — Ohio State faces 6. The "Ranked only" checkbox filters a week down to games with at least one ranked team.
AP poll
The Associated Press poll is published every Sunday during the season and in preseason before anyone has played. On /rankings/ the number in brackets after a team is its count of first-place votes, "Pts" is the total its ballots earned, and "Also receiving votes" lists the teams that fell short of 25. It decides nothing officially — it does not pick the playoff field — but it is what "a ranked team" means in ordinary talk and on this site's rows.
Coaches poll
It runs on the same weekly cycle and in the same format as the AP poll, with first-place votes in brackets and a receiving-votes list. The two disagree in detail: in the current preseason the AP has Notre Dame fourth and the coaches have it fifth, and the coaches have Clemson at 23 while the AP has it outside. Like the AP poll it selects nothing.
Bye week (open week)
FBS teams play 12 regular-season games across a 15-week calendar, so nearly every team has two or three weeks off. Ohio State's are weeks 8, 14 and 15. Weeks 14 and 15 sit empty for most teams because those are the conference championship dates, and only the two teams that qualify play. This is a different thing from a playoff bye, which is a free pass through a round.
Strength of schedule (SOS)
On this site it is the mean efficiency margin of a team's FBS opponents, taken from The College King's final 2025 ratings. Higher is harder: Ohio State's +5.3 ranks 14th of 138. Because it is built from last season's ratings it is a preseason estimate until 2026 games are played, and the page says so under every table that uses it. It is the honest counterweight to a record — 11-1 against a -3 schedule is not 11-1 against a +6 one.
Efficiency margin
It is the headline row of the matchup page's ratings table, with the team's rank of 138 next to it. Positive is above average and negative is below, so TCU at +4.0 (#42) is a good deal better than North Carolina at -7.7 (#110). Being opponent-adjusted matters: running up scores on weak opponents does not inflate it the way raw points do. Teams outside FBS have no rating and show "no data".
Offense and defense (pts/100)
Measuring per play rather than per game lets a fast team and a slow team be compared fairly. On the offense row a higher number is better; on the defense row a lower number is better. The bars share a scale within each row, and the site draws the longer bar for the better figure in both cases — so on the defense row the longer bar belongs to the smaller number.
Pace (plays/g)
Pace is context, not quality: 58.1 plays a game is not worse than 70.9, it is a different way to play. It explains why two teams with similar per-play numbers can score very different totals, and why per-100-play ratings are used above it. A fast team also gives its own defense more work, which is why the points-allowed row and the defense rating can disagree.
Yards per play, and yards per play allowed
It is the plainest measure of whether a team moves the ball, and it sits under the ratings rows so you can see what the rating is built on. Around 5.0 is ordinary and above 6.0 is strong. Unlike the pts/100 rows above it, this one is raw and not adjusted for who the opponents were.
Common opponents
There are 138 FBS teams and each plays 12 games, so the great majority of pairs never share a field. The comparison tool takes two teams, or up to four, and lists every shared opponent, what each did against it, and the games only one of them plays. Before those games are played it shows the week and site of each scheduled meeting rather than a result. Two teams in the same conference can still share very few opponents, because an 18-team Big Ten plays only 9 league games each.
Conference championship game
Ten conferences hold one, on 4 or 5 December, and /predict/ lists each with its date and the size of the league behind it. For the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC, winning it is the only way to claim one of the four automatic playoff bids. Who reaches it is settled by conference record, and by that conference's published tiebreakers when records match.
Tiebreaker
Each predictor page prints its own conference's list in order. The SEC starts with head-to-head between the tied teams, then record against common conference opponents, then record against the highest-placed common opponent, and on down to a random draw. The site marks the steps it cannot compute from your picks — capped relative scoring margin, a coin toss — as "not derivable from picks", and says which order it used instead. Conferences do revise these rules, which is why the steps are printed rather than applied silently.
Standings columns: Conf, Overall, Strk, PF, PA
"Conf" counts conference games only and is what decides a league title; "Overall" counts everything, non-conference and FCS games included. Strk is the current run of wins or losses, PF is points for and PA points against. Before the season all of these read 0-0 or a dash, and the standings page says outright that it is a list rather than a ranking until the first Saturday — the order shown is the preseason poll, then last season's rating.
Form
Green marks a win and red a loss, with "vs" for home and "at" for away. The label under the strip names the season the games come from, which before the first Saturday is the previous one. It is a quick read on how a team was playing, not a rating — the efficiency table above it is the rating.
Series history
The card gives who leads the series, whether the last meeting went the same way, the average margin and a table of each game with its date, score, site and winner. The window is stated in the heading, so "Series history · 2006-2026" is not a claim that the teams never met before 2006. A pair that has never met inside the window shows no table.
the playoff
CFP rankings
A committee of thirteen people ranks teams by judgment rather than by formula, publishing its first list in early November and revising it weekly. These rankings set the playoff seeds and the at-large places; the AP and coaches polls do not. This site's rankings page says plainly that the committee table does not exist yet rather than showing an empty one.
College Football Playoff (CFP)
Four teams get first-round byes and the other eight play on 18-19 December at the higher seed's stadium. Quarterfinals and semifinals rotate among the New Year's Six bowls, and the final is on 25 January at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. The site's CFP week view lists all eleven games now, with "Teams TBD" until the field exists, and /playoff/ builds a projected bracket from your own picks.
Automatic bid
Four go to the champions of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC. The fifth goes to the highest-ranked team from the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 or Sun Belt, whether or not it won its conference — that part is new for 2026, and /playoff/ explains the 2025 result that caused the change. Notre Dame, which has no conference, is guaranteed a place if it finishes inside the top twelve.
At-large bid
A team that loses its conference championship game can still make the field this way, and often does. Nothing stops a second team from the six leagues outside the power four taking one. At-large places are decided by the selection committee's rankings, not by the AP or coaches polls.
Seeding, byes and straight-seeding
Straight-seeded means the seeds follow the rankings, with no team moved up because it won a conference. Five plays twelve, six plays eleven, seven plays ten and eight plays nine, all at the higher seed's stadium. A bye here means a free pass into the quarterfinals, which is not the same as an open week in the regular season.
Power four and Group of Five
The power four are the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC. The Group of Five is the American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12 and Sun Belt. The split is about money, television and access rather than any rule, but it has a hard edge in the playoff format: four automatic bids belong to power-four champions and one to the best team from the other six.
Bowl game
There are 33 of them on this site's bowls tab, nearly all carrying a sponsor's name in the title. A bowl decides nothing beyond itself, and matchups are assigned by conference agreements after the regular season, which is why every row reads "Teams TBD" until December. A team normally needs six wins to be eligible for one.
New Year's Six
They are the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta and Peach bowls. In the current format the quarterfinals and semifinals rotate among them, so the playoff games on this site are named for the bowl hosting them — "College Football Playoff Quarterfinal at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic". In years when a given bowl is not hosting a playoff round it is an ordinary bowl with a strong matchup.
Teams TBD / matchup set later
Every bowl and every playoff game reads this way until the regular season finishes and the assignments are made. The row is not an error or missing data; the kickoff, the venue and the television are already fixed by contract, and only the participants are open. Filters on those weeks will find nothing by team for the same reason.
players
Depth chart (two-deep)
Every team page carries one, sourced from Ourlads and dated, because ESPN publishes no depth chart for college football. Positions use coaching shorthand — WR-X, WR-Z, WR-SL on offense, NT, WLB, NB on defense — and the section headers name the scheme, such as Spread Option and 4-2-5. Click a name for that player's season and career line. Most linemen, defenders and specialists read "No production on file" because the statistics feed behind the site covers quarterbacks, running backs, receivers and tight ends, and nothing is invented to fill the gap.
Transfer portal
Players change schools freely now, and a roster can turn over heavily in a single offseason. On the depth chart a new arrival is tagged "transfer"; on the roster page the tag names his previous school, and his season table shows which team he played for in each year. Ohio State's roster page reports that 4 of its tracked players were on another FBS roster in 2025. This is also why a team's leaders from last season may no longer be on it.
Redshirt (RS) and class year
Class years on this site read FR, SO, JR, SR and GR for graduate, with RS in front where the player has redshirted. A player gets four seasons of eligibility, and a redshirt year lets him practice and develop without spending one. This is why a college roster holds men of six or seven different ages, and why a listed freshman may already have been on campus a year.
Season leaders
The two cards low on each matchup page give the leaders for the season named on the card, taken from ESPN. That list is keyed to the season and not to today's roster, so a player who has since transferred or run out of eligibility still appears against the year he earned the numbers. A team switches to this season's figures once it has played a game. The roster and depth-chart pages are where the current squad is.
the site
Predict mode
The button in the header switches between Viewing mode and Predict mode, and the navigation changes with it. Every game starts on the favorite, and changing one pick recomputes the standings, the conference tiebreakers and the projected playoff bracket together. Your picks live in this browser only — there is no account and nothing is uploaded — and the address bar always holds a link that reproduces them.
Scorecard
Only games you picked yourself are scored; anything left on the default belongs to the board, not to you. The favorites' record over that identical set of games is the bar, because a 70 percent season only means something if the board did worse. The page keeps a straight-up record and an against-the-spread record apart, and shows how many games had no line to grade against.
Week strip and kickoff times
The strip across the top of the schedule moves between weeks, with the bowls tab and the CFP tab at the end. Most games are on Saturday, with a handful spread across Thursday through Monday, and each team plays 12 of the 15 weeks. The label beside each kickoff names the time zone being used, and the subheading under the week title says the same.