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Paul's Picks 2026 Week 1

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Welcome Back! This is always one of my favorite weeks of the year- games on 5 straight days! Last week, I was very mediocre with a 5-3 record, a winning percentage of 62.5%. The games I missed were competitive, but losses nonetheless.  Oh well, there are still many, many games to go. And this week, there are a LOT of FBS vs FCS games, which history shows us is won by FBS teams greater than 90% of the time. So I just have to do well on the other games. There are 91(!) games in total this week, which I hope is the most for any week this year, because it took me a long time to prepare for this. So... on with the picks! Thursday, September 3 UMass @ Rutgers - The Scarlet Knights lead the series 3-2, winning the last 3 (1976, 1978, and 2019). The 2 wins by UMass were in 1967 and 1973, and they are 1-2 in East Rutherford/Piscataway. Rutgers was not very good last year at 5-7, but the Minutemen were 0-12. This should be an easy win for the Scarlet Knights. Bethune Cookman @ UCF - The Knig...
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Odds and Ends 9/2/26

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Welcome Back! Today will be a little sparse, as there were only 8 games this past weekend, and there just isn't much to analyze. Interconference results As I mentioned above, there were only 8 games, and 2 were conference games. Here is where we stand so far: ACC 3-0 Big Ten 1-0 American 1-0 Mountain West 1-3 Big 12 0-1 CUSA 0-2 The ACC is off to a strong start, while the Mountain West and CUSA have stumbled out of the gate. Intraconference results The only conference with divisions is the Sun Belt, and they have yet to play a game. Undefeated/Winless teams I will start to list these after Week 2 (we just finished Week Zero). Bowl eligible/eliminated I will start listing these as soon as teams become bowl eligible (6 wins) or eliminated (7 losses). Look for this in October. Paul's Playoff Picks All of my picks are still in play (obviously), but UNLV's chances as the G6 representative have taken a hit, while Memphis' chances have improved. As a refresher, here is the set...
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Power Rankings 9/1/26

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Welcome Back! As you might expect, there weren't very many changes, as there were only 8 games involving 16 FBS teams. After their big wins, North Carolina moves up 20 spots to #72, and Stanford moves up 6 spots to #114 after their win over Hawaii. The other 6 teams all moved from one to 19 places up or down.  This is much more movement than I've had in the past, which was my intention when I set up this year's Power Rankings.  As a reminder, I use a points based system. Teams start out with a certain number of points based on 12 different factors, and those points range from a low of -20.887 (#138 UMass) to a high of 315.128 points (#1 Oregon), so as you can see, there are about 335 points separating 1st and last place- plenty of room to fit in 136 additional teams. In other words, teams are an average of 2.4 points apart, but of course they aren't spaced evenly; some are 10-20 points away from another while others are less than a point away. To illustrate the differen...
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