Well folks, it’s here already, the 2017 (season) College Football Playoff National Championship (yeah, we know it’s called 2018 officially). This season will mark a first for the CFBPlayoff, matching two teams from a single conference in the final. The top-rated conference in college football, the SEC, will boast both participants in this season’s Championship Game despite being down a bit in terms of overall across-the-conference team strength this season. The SEC Champion Georgia Bulldogs will be the “home” team, both based on seeding and location, when they take on the second-place finishers of the SEC West, the Alabama Crimson Tide. Alabama has been to all four invitationals now and this will be their third straight appearance in the final game. This is also the third straight final with two teams from the southeastern United States. Yep, we love our college football down here in the South and we play it pretty well.
Both teams are roughly mirror images of each other, as shown by our statistical side-by-side above (click on the chart to expand for better viewing). Both have studs in the offensive backfield, powerful offensive lines, top-rated rushing offenses, mediocre passing attacks, and top-5 defenses that get after quarterbacks and destroy their opponent’s rushing attack. The key to this game seems to be which of the quarterbacks will have the better day throwing downfield. Georgia’s Jake Fromm may be the better pure passer, but Alabama’s experienced signal-caller Jalen Hurts is equally effective as a big-play creator and comes in with 808 rushing yards to go along with his 17 passing TDs. Neither QB turns the ball over much, Fromm with only 5 interceptions and Hurts with a ridiculous 1 on the year.
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Common opponents
These SEC brothers had only 4 common opponents in 2017, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Mississippi State, and Auburn. Alabama went 3-1 against those common foes, with their loss coming in the Iron Bowl against Auburn...saving the Tide from having to play that extra game in Atlanta. Georgia was 4-1 against those common opponents, famously avenging their blowout loss to Auburn in that extra game that Alabama didn’t have to play.
Georgia scored an average of 32.4 points against common opponents and gave up an average of 12.8
Alabama scored an average of 37.3 points against common opponents and gave up an average of 14.3.
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The Predictions
Las Vegas has Alabama installed as roughly a 3.5 point favorite and predicts a low-scoring game. (44.5 Over/Under)
Our computer disagrees on both counts, strangely predicting a very close win by Georgia in a fairly high scoring contest with a lot of rushing success by both teams:
Score
Alabama 29
Georgia 31
Rushing yards
Alabama 242
Georgia 240
Passing yards
Alabama 196
Georgia 180
We would be stunned if the final numbers are even close to these predictions by our computer. After all, Alabama has not given up 200 yards rushing once this year and has held 8 teams below 100 yards. Georgia has given up 200+ yards only twice, including in last week’s Rose Bowl to Oklahoma (ironically exactly 242 yards, the same number the computer predicts Alabama will get).
We (the human we) agree more with Vegas, a close, ugly, low-scoring game with very little success on offense for either team. We’ll see...over the past 3 seasons the computer has beaten Las Vegas by over 5% in predicting the straight-up winner of games with a spread below 3 points.