Welcome to the official start of the 2026 season! This is the first year with 6 players across two pods, but drafting seems to have gone off without a hitch. Today is the “week 0” games and the first week of our game starts on Thursday.
Before the start I thought I’d like to recap where we stand and summarize the draft.

Draft report

To set the stage, lets look at who all players drafted:

Pick number	Bruce	Bob	Dan	Dylan	Jacob	Zach
1	Ohio State	Georgia	Notre Dame	Ohio State	Notre Dame	Oregon
2	Texas Tech	Miami	Oregon	Georgia	SMU	Miami
3	BYU	Indiana	Western Michigan	Houston	Texas Tech	Indiana
4	LSU	Boise State	Clemson	Penn State	Toledo	Boise State
5	SMU	Utah	Texas A&M	Clemson	Texas A&M	LSU
6	UNLV	James Madison	Ole Miss	Navy	Delaware	BYU
7	Penn State	Texas	Navy	James Madison	Tennessee	Jacksonville State
8	San Diego State	Liberty	Louisiana	Liberty	South Florida	UConn
9	UTSA	Toledo	New Mexico	San Diego State	UNLV	UTSA
10	Old Dominion	North Dakota State	Alabama	North Dakota State	Virginia	Texas
11	Jacksonville State	Houston	Iowa State	Alabama	Miami (OH)	Western Michigan
12	Miami (OH)	Louisville	Oklahoma	Arizona	Iowa	New Mexico
13	Fresno State	Michigan	Cincinnati	Texas State	Old Dominion	Marshall
14	Memphis	South Florida	Kennesaw State	California	Kansas State	Michigan
15	USC	East Carolina	Ohio	Ole Miss	Fresno State	South Carolina
16	Tennessee	Hawai’i	TCU	Memphis	Washington	Utah
17	Missouri	Kansas State	Florida State	USC	Tulane	Arkansas State
18	Virginia	Western Kentucky	Air Force	Western Kentucky	Ohio	Louisville
19	Middle Tennessee	Marshall	App State	UCF	Nebraska	Army
20	Arizona State	Tulane	Oregon State	South Alabama	Nevada	Kennesaw State
21	NC State	Central Michigan	Army	Oklahoma	Vanderbilt	Troy
22	Nevada	Pittsburgh	Sam Houston	North Texas	Missouri State	Utah State
23	Troy	Iowa	Colorado	Air Force	TCU	Buffalo
24	Washington State	Texas State	Northern Illinois	Louisiana	Oregon State	Virginia Tech
25	Buffalo	Florida	Georgia Tech	Washington State	Pittsburgh	Arizona State
26	Virginia Tech	Washington	Florida Atlantic	NC State	East Carolina	Florida Atlantic
27	Louisiana Tech	Arizona	UTEP	Kansas	Illinois	Hawai’i
28	North Texas	Delaware	Utah State	Duke	Southern Miss	Florida
29	West Virginia	South Carolina	Illinois	Central Michigan	Sacramento State	Eastern Michigan
30	South Alabama	Arkansas State	Colorado State	Wisconsin	Baylor	Wake Forest

For a 1-90 draft order by pod, see the supplementary tables below.
Using these draft numbers, we’ll look at some trends about team strengths and how we collectively viewed these teams and conferences.

Draft results by player

To get a first glance at how each roster stacks up superficially, we can
take all teams’ FPIs and add them up. The table below shows the total and average FPI of every player’s total roster:

Player	Pod	Total roster FPI	Average FPI
Bob	White Pod	137.1	4.57
Dylan	Orange Pod	106.4	3.55
Jacob	Orange Pod	94.5	3.15
Zach	Orange Pod	89.1	2.97
Bruce	White Pod	71.8	2.39
Dan	White Pod	29.0	0.97

But average doesn’t mean much when you’re barely playing about half the teams each week. We can also create a “starting lineup” for each player based on those FPI measures. For each player, I’ve slotted in a theoretical lineup based on our scoring format (top from each conference, then next 3 best P4 and 2 best G6 teams, then best remaining). Based on the sums of FPIs, the best projected average lineup is Bob with an FPI of 138.9. You can see the full results in the table below:

Player	Pod	Starting-lineup FPI (16 slots)
Bob	White Pod	138.9
Zach	Orange Pod	127.1
Bruce	White Pod	113.6
Dylan	Orange Pod	113.2
Jacob	Orange Pod	107.6
Dan	White Pod	103.1

Next, we can look at the “bench” for each player, or the FPI of their remaining 14 teams. Bob again has the highest:

Player	Pod	Bench FPI (remaining 14 teams)
Bob	White Pod	-1.8
Dylan	Orange Pod	-6.9
Jacob	Orange Pod	-13.1
Zach	Orange Pod	-38.1
Bruce	White Pod	-41.8
Dan	White Pod	-74.1

Of course, this is a very shallow prediction – FPI in the early season isn’t very valuable with no data to base it on, and it doesn’t account for the game, and even when it’s got data it’ll be of limited value because of the huge variance in game-to-game results.

Warning: Dangerously shoddy methodology projections

As I said, FPI isn’t a super great metric to base predictions on at this stage. But let’s just go for it. In this section, I’ve made a really rough roster-strength screener. I got the FPI measure for both teams in every FBS game this season (and put in a flat -30 for FCS opponents). For each game, I added +1.5 FPI to the home team and -1.5 to the away team to account for home-field advantage. Then, for every game where the favorite had at least a +1.0 adjFPI advantage, I added that advantage to the player total who owned them. The table below shows the total favorable FPI of all teams for each player for all games where they have an FPI advantage.

Player	Pod	Favorable adj-FPI edge	Favorable games	Edge excl. FCS	Games excl. FCS
Bob	White Pod	3310.4	254	2358.0	228
Jacob	Orange Pod	3057.0	234	2131.9	208
Zach	Orange Pod	3025.3	225	2063.4	197
Dylan	Orange Pod	2890.6	221	2003.4	195
Bruce	White Pod	2867.8	220	2007.4	194
Dan	White Pod	2563.0	191	1653.6	163

By that metric, the top team this year is Notre Dame with a +282 (owned by Jacob and Dan), followed by Texas Tech at +258 (Jacob and Bruce), Indiana at +252 (Bob and Zach), and Ohio State at +250 (Bruce and Dylan).
One thing to look out for as the season progresses is how schedules line up. It’s possible that some of us may have a lot of really favorable games but they fall on weeks where they can’t all be played, leaving a lot of points orphaned.

Draft results by team and conference

The more interesting details, in my mind, are looking at the draft and seeing how the six of us collectively ranked and prioritized these teams.
There was very strong consensus across the top of the board: the top 5 teams were the same, just shuffled, and of the next 5 there were 3 that were only 1 pick different between pods. Below are the top 10 (in this section, teams were score 90-0 where first pick got 90, last pick got 1, and undrafted teams got 0).

Rank	Team	Conf	Orange pts	White pts	Total pts
1	Notre Dame	P4_IND	90	89	179
2	Ohio State	B1G	88	90	178
3	Oregon	B1G	89	86	175
4	Georgia	SEC	87	88	175
5	Miami	ACC	86	87	173
6	Texas Tech	B12	84	85	169
7	Indiana	B1G	83	82	165
8	SMU	ACC	85	78	163
9	Boise State	PAC	80	81	161
10	BYU	B12	74	84	158

There were 34 teams that went undrafted in both pods, and 28 teams that went undrafted in one pod. Of that 28, these are the top 10 teams that were picked in one pod but not the other:

Team	Pick	Drafted by
UConn	23	Zach (Orange Pod)
Iowa State	32	Dan (White Pod)
Cincinnati	38	Dan (White Pod)
California	40	Dylan (Orange Pod)
Missouri	49	Bruce (White Pod)
Florida State	50	Dan (White Pod)
Nebraska	55	Jacob (Orange Pod)
Middle Tennessee	55	Bruce (White Pod)
App State	56	Dan (White Pod)
UCF	57	Dylan (Orange Pod)

The clear outlier here is UConn, picked a full 9 spots higher than the next highest singleton and solidly in the top 1/3 of the draft. Overall, it seems like the White Pod was more likely to reach on some of these teams that we were less in agreement about, with 4 of the next 5.
There are also some notable disagreements among teams that both pods drafted. The clear winner in this regard is Delaware, who was drafted 64 spots higher in Orange Pod than White Pod. The biggest disagreements are shown in this table:

Team	Conf	Orange pick	White pick	Gap (spots)
Delaware	CUSA	18	82	64
Louisiana	SBC	70	23	47
Arizona	B12	34	81	47
South Carolina	SEC	44	87	43
Arkansas State	SBC	50	88	38
Hawai’i	MWC	80	46	34
East Carolina	AAC	78	45	33
Iowa	B1G	36	69	33
South Alabama	SBC	58	90	32
Utah	B12	47	15	32

All of these teams are probably going to be pretty bad, so there’s not a lot of damage done here. But this may be an example of the opportunity cost of these picks; the player that picked them might have been able to get a better team elsewhere and still picked up this one later in the draft.

Here you can see all the picks vs FPI which represents the trend nicely. In the early picks, not only is there a higher percentage of high FPI picks early, but the correlation is much stronger. As we get to the later rounds, there’s still an obviously downward trend, but the correlation is so loose it’s probably statistically insignicant (I didn’t do the math, just eyeballed it).

There’s a noticeable cluster of highly picked but not super high FPI teams, highlighed in the red ellipse. These could be teams to look out for; they probably had a lot of talent but a lot of question marks, so if things come together they could be good for a ton of points, or they could be this year’s version of 2025 Penn State.

Draft results by conference

Next, we can look at how we all drafted the conferences. It should surprise no one that the SEC and the Big Ten are head-and-shoulders ahead of the pack, reflecting that the “P4” is more like “P2, and also 2 pretty good conferences.” But because both are so big and so good at the top, they actually had a lower pick rate – between the 6 of us, we only picked 12 SEC and 11 Big Ten teams (out of 16 and 18, respectively) but we picked 8/10 C-USA and Mountain West, all but one Big 12 team, and every Pac “12” team (8/8, obviously). The table below lists the conferences by total pick points:

Conference	Tier	Teams picked	In conference	Total pick points	Avg pts / picked team	Avg pick #
SEC	P4	12	16	1204	100.3	36.3
B1G	P4	11	18	1052	95.6	38.4
B12	P4	15	16	1045	69.7	45.6
ACC	P4	13	17	928	71.4	46.8
AAC	G6	9	14	749	83.2	49.4
SBC	G6	10	14	621	62.1	54.5
CUSA	G6	8	10	598	74.8	45.0
MWC	G6	8	10	589	73.6	48.9
PAC	G6	8	8	589	73.6	51.7
MAC	G6	8	13	568	71.0	50.4

We picked the ACC and Big 12 surprisingly low, which reflects (and possibly validates) my belief that those conferences are really a crapshoot beyond Miami and Texas Tech. There are so many teams in each that are nearly interchangeable that it’s better for the mechanics of this game to pick the G6 teams with the higher marginal value of getting the decent G6 teams before they’re gone and you’re stuck with something abysmal.
That is more apparent in this next table. In this table, I’ve switched from the average to the top n teams in each conference (top single team, top 2 teams, top 4 teams, and top 8 teams):

Conference	Tier	Top 1	Top 2	Top 4	Top 8
B1G	P4	178	353	671	996
SEC	P4	175	331	618	1057
ACC	P4	173	336	590	826
B12	P4	169	327	587	870
AAC	G6	146	277	489	721
MAC	G6	143	285	484	568
PAC	G6	161	292	467	589
MWC	G6	139	265	446	589
SBC	G6	145	260	436	602
CUSA	G6	138	269	433	598

This, again, at least confirms that I’m not alone but also possibly validates my opinion that the Big Ten has overtaken the SEC in the elite, top of conference teams, but the SEC is deeper and has the best middle group of teams of any conference. And it also puts the conferences in roughly an order that would be hard to debate (SEC and Big Ten above all, ACC and Big 12 below them but well above the G6, and American well above the rest of the G6).

Here is a graphic representation of how the conferences stacked up. The G6 FPIs show why raw FPI totals aren’t necessarily a perfect metric. If you overdraft P4 teams, you could have a lot of relatively higher FPI teams sitting on the bench every week and open spots in the G6.

Next up

With all that said, the season is about as predictable as the weather so it may very well turn out that none of us know what we’re talking about and these picks were all terrible. But that’s the fun of sports and this game.
As previously stated, week 0 starts today. Between us, every game has at least one team owned by one player, and in 3/8 games both teams are owned in both pods. Several of us will be banking points and all of us will be getting some data on at least a few of our teams. These games (and their teams’ respective owners) are:

• Eastern Michigan (Zach) vs Sacramento State (Jacob)
• Florida State (Dan) vs New Mexico State (unowned)
• North Dakota State (Bob, Dylan) vs Jacksonville State (Bruce, Zach)
• Stanford (unowned) vs Hawai’i (Bob, Zach)
• TCU (Dan, Jacob) vs North Carolina (unowned)
• USC (Bruce, Dylan) vs San José State (unowned)
• Virginia (Bruce, Jacob) vs NC State (Bruce, Dylan)
• UNLV (Bruce, Jacob) vs Memphis (Bruce, Dylan)

Week 1 starts Thursday, September 3, with 11 Thursday night games and goes through the Labor Day game on Monday, September 7.

My picks for games of the day this week (week 1)

• Thursday – only 1 game looks even remotely intriguing – Colorado @ Georgia Tech (7/11 games are FBS vs FCS, and 2 of the 3 FBS games feature UMass and Akron who might actually be worse than some of the FCS teams)
• Friday – San Jose State @ Eastern Michigan – both are dark horse possiblities to win their conferences or at least be competitive, and it’s the only game with a single digit spread. Side note: only one other game has a <20 spread, and that’s Toledo at Michigan State (MSU-10). Mel Tucker really blew that program up; how hard is it to just be normal?
• Saturday – Boise State @ Oregon(afternoon), Clemson @ LSU (primetime), UNLV @ Hawai’i (late night)
• Sunday – only day where all the games look at least decent, my pick would be Louisville @ Ole Miss which is literally the only ranked vs ranked matchup of the whole weekend (side note – what are we even doing here if that’s possible!?). But Wisconsin @ Notre Dame has an outside chance; Wisconsin could be a sneaky good team.
• Monday – only one game on Monday, SMU @ FSU

Matchups for week 1

• Bob vs Zach
• Bruce vs Jacob
• Dan vs Dylan

Conclusions

No conclusions, just wanted to get your attention to say good luck and have fun! Looking forward to a great season.

Supplementary tables

The full 1–90 pick order for each pod, referenced above.

Orange Pod — full draft order

Pick	Player	Team
1	Jacob	Notre Dame
2	Zach	Oregon
3	Dylan	Ohio State
4	Dylan	Georgia
5	Zach	Miami
6	Jacob	SMU
7	Jacob	Texas Tech
8	Zach	Indiana
9	Dylan	Houston
10	Dylan	Penn State
11	Zach	Boise State
12	Jacob	Toledo
13	Jacob	Texas A&M
14	Zach	LSU
15	Dylan	Clemson
16	Dylan	Navy
17	Zach	BYU
18	Jacob	Delaware
19	Jacob	Tennessee
20	Zach	Jacksonville State
21	Dylan	James Madison
22	Dylan	Liberty
23	Zach	UConn
24	Jacob	South Florida
25	Jacob	UNLV
26	Zach	UTSA
27	Dylan	San Diego State
28	Dylan	North Dakota State
29	Zach	Texas
30	Jacob	Virginia
31	Jacob	Miami (OH)
32	Zach	Western Michigan
33	Dylan	Alabama
34	Dylan	Arizona
35	Zach	New Mexico
36	Jacob	Iowa
37	Jacob	Old Dominion
38	Zach	Marshall
39	Dylan	Texas State
40	Dylan	California
41	Zach	Michigan
42	Jacob	Kansas State
43	Jacob	Fresno State
44	Zach	South Carolina
45	Dylan	Ole Miss
46	Dylan	Memphis
47	Zach	Utah
48	Jacob	Washington
49	Jacob	Tulane
50	Zach	Arkansas State
51	Dylan	USC
52	Dylan	Western Kentucky
53	Zach	Louisville
54	Jacob	Ohio
55	Jacob	Nebraska
56	Zach	Army
57	Dylan	UCF
58	Dylan	South Alabama
59	Zach	Kennesaw State
60	Jacob	Nevada
61	Jacob	Vanderbilt
62	Zach	Troy
63	Dylan	Oklahoma
64	Dylan	North Texas
65	Zach	Utah State
66	Jacob	Missouri State
67	Jacob	TCU
68	Zach	Buffalo
69	Dylan	Air Force
70	Dylan	Louisiana
71	Zach	Virginia Tech
72	Jacob	Oregon State
73	Jacob	Pittsburgh
74	Zach	Arizona State
75	Dylan	Washington State
76	Dylan	NC State
77	Zach	Florida Atlantic
78	Jacob	East Carolina
79	Jacob	Illinois
80	Zach	Hawai’i
81	Dylan	Kansas
82	Dylan	Duke
83	Zach	Florida
84	Jacob	Southern Miss
85	Jacob	Sacramento State
86	Zach	Eastern Michigan
87	Dylan	Central Michigan
88	Dylan	Wisconsin
89	Zach	Wake Forest
90	Jacob	Baylor

White Pod — full draft order

Pick	Player	Team
1	Bruce	Ohio State
2	Dan	Notre Dame
3	Bob	Georgia
4	Bob	Miami
5	Dan	Oregon
6	Bruce	Texas Tech
7	Bruce	BYU
8	Dan	Western Michigan
9	Bob	Indiana
10	Bob	Boise State
11	Dan	Clemson
12	Bruce	LSU
13	Bruce	SMU
14	Dan	Texas A&M
15	Bob	Utah
16	Bob	James Madison
17	Dan	Ole Miss
18	Bruce	UNLV
19	Bruce	Penn State
20	Dan	Navy
21	Bob	Texas
22	Bob	Liberty
23	Dan	Louisiana
24	Bruce	San Diego State
25	Bruce	UTSA
26	Dan	New Mexico
27	Bob	Toledo
28	Bob	North Dakota State
29	Dan	Alabama
30	Bruce	Old Dominion
31	Bruce	Jacksonville State
32	Dan	Iowa State
33	Bob	Houston
34	Bob	Louisville
35	Dan	Oklahoma
36	Bruce	Miami (OH)
37	Bruce	Fresno State
38	Dan	Cincinnati
39	Bob	Michigan
40	Bob	South Florida
41	Dan	Kennesaw State
42	Bruce	Memphis
43	Bruce	USC
44	Dan	Ohio
45	Bob	East Carolina
46	Bob	Hawai’i
47	Dan	TCU
48	Bruce	Tennessee
49	Bruce	Missouri
50	Dan	Florida State
51	Bob	Kansas State
52	Bob	Western Kentucky
53	Dan	Air Force
54	Bruce	Virginia
55	Bruce	Middle Tennessee
56	Dan	App State
57	Bob	Marshall
58	Bob	Tulane
59	Dan	Oregon State
60	Bruce	Arizona State
61	Bruce	NC State
62	Dan	Army
63	Bob	Central Michigan
64	Bob	Pittsburgh
65	Dan	Sam Houston
66	Bruce	Nevada
67	Bruce	Troy
68	Dan	Colorado
69	Bob	Iowa
70	Bob	Texas State
71	Dan	Northern Illinois
72	Bruce	Washington State
73	Bruce	Buffalo
74	Dan	Georgia Tech
75	Bob	Florida
76	Bob	Washington
77	Dan	Florida Atlantic
78	Bruce	Virginia Tech
79	Bruce	Louisiana Tech
80	Dan	UTEP
81	Bob	Arizona
82	Bob	Delaware
83	Dan	Utah State
84	Bruce	North Texas
85	Bruce	West Virginia
86	Dan	Illinois
87	Bob	South Carolina
88	Bob	Arkansas State
89	Dan	Colorado State
90	Bruce	South Alabama