"Is this mic on? Live from East Lansing, it's Friday night!"

The wait is finally over. The Jonathan Smith era of Michigan State football has finally arrived. But much like some other programs of note, things did not get off to as smooth of a start as hoped.

The Spartans did eke out a 16-10 victory over the Owls of Florida Atlantic. The defense did look a lot better than expected. The unit forced a safety, only gave up one touchdown and forced a turnover on downs in each of Florida Atlantic's final three possessions.

At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, the performance of the offense was underwhelming, and the team committed far too many penalties and other pratfalls. On balance, some might conclude that a lot of the players are not yet ready for prime time. It was enough to give some brothers the blues.

But just because the first game, or even the first season of something, does not go as well is not a guarantee that it will not be a success in the long run. Sometimes it simply takes some time for the ensemble to hit its stride.

The current Michigan State team is young, has a lot of fresh faces, a new coaching staff and a new scheme on both sides of the ball. A few hiccups are to be expected. From what I saw live on Friday night, most, if not all, of errors are correctable.

At the end of the day, winning ugly is better than losing pretty. It is best to have patience and to give Coach Smith and company and players like Aidan Chiles time to grow into their new roles. This first season is likely to have its ups and downs, but there is still a chance that the current cast of characters contains a few stars.

So don't get all verklempt, Spartan fans, the Smith era is just getting started.

For those who are unfamiliar with the way I structure this series, here is a quick primer. Every week during the college football season I will present my computer's recommended wages in my Bad Betting Advice column. Following the week's action, I will provide an update for the weekend's result along with some comments on the action across the country.

One figure that I prepare is a comparison of the outcome of each game relative to the opening point spread. That result for Week One of 2024 is shown below in Figure 1.

Each data point represents one game. The position of the data point either above or below the solid diagonal line reveals whether the favored team beat the opening spread or not. The farther a data point is from the center diagonal, the bigger the deviation from the spread.

The two diagonal lines represent one standard deviation from the mean (the opening spread), which is equal to just over 14 points. In other words, in roughly one-third of all college football games, the final point differential is two touchdowns away from the opening spread. Favored teams whose data point falls outside of the dotted line either overachieved or underachieved by a significant margin (over one standard deviation).

A total of six teams are in the overachiever category in Week One: Alabama, Texas, Georgia, Miami, Arizona and perhaps unfortunately, the Spartans' next opponent, Maryland.

No team finished in the underachievement category, yet still won, although UCLA's three-point win at Hawaii (+17) and South Carolina's four-point win over Old Dominion (+17) barely missed the cut.

Most teams that underachieve by more than 14 points wind up taking an upset loss. In Week One, a total of nine teams were bitten by the upset bug. Table 1 below summarizes those nine games and compares these results to the upset picks made last week.

A majority of the upset picks in Week One involved only Group of Five teams, including the two biggest upsets of the weekend: Nevada over Troy (-15.5) and Sam Houston State over Rice (-12.5).

The biggest surprise of the weekend in the Power Four was Vanderbilt's (+12) upset win over Virginia Tech, which was a team that some people even projected to be a dark horse playoff contender.

The computer systems both had a great start to the season. My algorithm went two-for-two, correctly predicting mild upset wins by both Notre Dame and Eastern Michigan. ESPN's Football Power Index went 2-1 in Week One and correctly foresaw North Carolina getting the win at Minnesota.

Table 2 below gives the results of the computers' picks against the opening spread.

My algorithm decided to sit out Week One, and the FPI was just at .500 (3-3) for the suggested bets. Overall, however, both machines performed well considering the full slate of games. My computer went 22-15 (59.5%) for the weekend, while the FPI did even better at 24-13 (64.9%).

Table 3 below gives the results of the point total bets for Week One, which were also quite positive.

Not.

My methodology for point total betting continued last year's trend of being awful. The full set of picks in Table 3 were a poor 8-14 (36.4%), but the so-called "lock" picks were a dismal 2-7 (22%).

With the current trend of poor performance, I wonder if the point total bets are no longer worthy to be a part of this analysis. I will continue to track the predictions and the results, but it might be time to place them in a van down by the Red Cedar River.

Following the results of Week Four, I have re-run the full season Monte Carlo simulation using the updated power rankings, including the current uncertainty in those rankings, to update the season odds for each team. Table 4 below gives the update for the Big Ten conference and Table 5 shows the updated Big Ten win distribution matrix.

Note that all the rankings listed next to each team refer to my computer's power rankings and not any of the national polls.