I am just going to get this out of the way right off the bat. The team visiting East Lansing this week from the town of Richmond, Virginia has a cool mascot. They are the Spiders. They even have a cool logo. Check this out:

Amazing!

I believe spiders are an underrated and underutilized mascot. I am willing to bet people are far more intimidated, if not flat-out terrified, by arachnids than they are by (for example) certain carrion-eating weasels with yellow stripes that no longer live in the state of Michigan. Amiright?

As for the football-playing spider people, Bill Connelly's SP+ rankings had Richmond ranked among the Football Championship Subdivision's mightiest heroes in the preseason at No. 14. But the Spiders proceeded to lose to No. 102 Morgan State, 17-10, at home last week. As a result, Richmond has been downgraded to No. 33 in the FCS universe.

Unless a super-power granting radioactive spider got loose in the Richmond locker room last weekend, or unless large sections of the Richmond roster have been secretly replaced by ringers from a parallel version of Earth, Spartan fans should be able to breathe easy this weekend. The odds of a season-destroying canon event happing in Spartan Stadium are exceptionally low.

But for those Spartan fans who have a tendency toward arachnophobia or if your spidey senses are tingling due to a case of hypocynophobia (the fear of underdogs...which I just made up) then let me provide this fuel for your nightmares.

My computer gives Michigan State just below a 97% chance to win this weekend, which is just slightly better than the odds for a No. 2 seed to beat a No. 15 seed in the NCAA basketball tournament. That's the good news. The bad news is both Michigan State and Richmond have been involved in two of the 10 total such upsets in history.

I imagine every Spartan fan recalls the Middle Tennessee State incident of 2016. Before Giddy Potts was even born, the first school to ever beat a No. 2 seed as a No. 15 seed was the Richmond Spiders, who upset No. 2 Syracuse in 1991. Neat.

The Richmond Spiders come to East Lansing this week as only the eighth opponent from the FCS to face the Spartans. Michigan State has never lost to an FCS opponent and, despite my warnings above, odds are that trend will continue.

I used some mathematical tricks to translate Richmond's SP+ ranking into my power index and this tells me if Richmond were in the FBS, the Spiders would currently be ranked No. 128 out of 133 teams. There is no betting line on the game that I have seen, but both my system and SP+ project the Spartans should be around a 26-point favorite (which corresponds to a 97% chance of victory).

When I asked my computer to generate a final score, it gave me Michigan State 35, Richmond 9, which is my "official" prediction. That said, if the Spiders can only manage 10 points at home against a below-average FCS team, we really should see a larger point differential, potentially a shutout, and lots and lots of underclassmen on the field in the second half.

All 14 Big Ten teams are playing non-conference opponents this week. Table 1 below gives a summary of the action in the Big Ten in Week Two, including my projected scores, the opening point spread and the computers' projected point differential.