Spread picks for every college football game in 2018’s Week 5

On Saturday evening, two games with significant national title stakes will kick off simultaneously: Ohio State and Penn State in Happy Valley and Stanford and Notre Dame in South Bend. From an impact standpoint, this might end up the biggest weekend of the season ... even if a sketchy slate precedes the big stuff it.

Below are FBS picks and projections using the S&P+ projections, listed in full for all 130 FBS teams here. See the bottom of the post for more detail about these.

The spread (listed in parentheses) is shown next to S&P+’s pick for each game. The team in bold is projected to beat the spread. (At most books, there is no listed spread for FCS games.) When S&P+ predicts a tie or a push (a tie with Vegas, basically), I list the pick on the side S&P+ would pick if teams could score in decimals.

This document breaks games (and S&P+’s season performance to date) out into their decimal glory. This year, I am including and monitoring total (over/under) picks as well.

Now that UNC is getting some of its players back from suspension, S&P+ might have the Tar Heels a little artificially low, if they predictably improve in the coming weeks. But Miami’s still pretty good.

Not going to lie: I was shocked that the line for Colorado-UCLA was in single digits with the game in Boulder.

S&P+ doesn’t think much of Stanford just yet, and that didn’t really change after last week’s magical escape act in Eugene. Beat the Irish, however, and you’ll probably start to move up rapidly.

Alabama is a damn near 50-point favorite ... and is almost projected to cover. Mercy.

Arizona has quietly looked a lot better over the last couple of weeks, but the level of competition now gets higher than it was against Southern Utah and Oregon State. Are the Wildcats still capable of making noise in the Pac-12 South?

S&P+ loves Buffalo at the moment. Will that still be the case after Army’s option offense?

For the second straight year, Vandy started like gangbusters but quickly regressed. Now’s a chance for the Commodores to catch their breath before a brutal set of road trips (five in the next six games).

Each year, I post weekly S&P+ picks as a way of affirming the ratings’ validity. I use my S&P+ system as a complement to most of my analysis, and the picks are a way of showing it generally knows what it’s talking about.

S&P+ tends to hit between 50 (meh) and 54 percent (great) against the spread from year to year. It isn’t always the single best performer, but it holds its own.

And beyond picks, it goes deeper than any other set of college football analytics on the market. You can go into granular detail regarding team strengths and weaknesses in a way that no other set of ratings allows. (See the annual team statistical profiles as proof.)