Flagship project
College Football Projection System
Weekly game projections for all FBS college football: set a week, run one command, get every
game with projected scores, spread, total, win probability, and comparison against market lines.
Python · LightGBM · pandas · Parquet · 17-endpoint REST ingestion · automated test suite.
7,401FBS games, walk-forward validated (2017–2025)
75.5%straight-up accuracy — Vegas closing lines: 76.3%
16.37margin RMSE — vs 23.06 always-pick-home, 18.75 SP+ differential
0.162Brier score, isotonic-calibrated, reported out-of-fold
Built like software, judged like a hypothesis
A ridge-regression rating layer anchored on preseason priors, two LightGBM models over
~28 features, a 10,000-run Monte Carlo season simulator with empirically measured
correlated team-strength uncertainty, and an experiment lab where a candidate idea must
beat the baseline on both fixed walk-forward
folds to be adopted. A weekly loop projects the slate, grades the results, and measures
drift against a matched baseline — drift is a number rather than a feeling.
What the model can’t do, measured
Across seven spread buckets and seven total buckets, no betting edge is statistically
significant. Hit rates run 48.6%–55.5% against the 52.4% break-even, non-monotonically —
exactly what chance produces across seven looks. The system says so on its own report card.
Building the significance test that kills your own headline is the point: a model you
can’t trust to admit failure can’t be trusted to claim success.