Each week, an elite group of bookmakers and professional bettors provide Pregame.com with their private power rankings. These are numbers that influence the worldwide sports betting market and together are calculated into the Vegas rankings. Four categories tell you what the "experts in the desert" truthfully think about the teams:
TRUE POWER: How good Vegas thinks a team really is.
HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE: The value of each team's home field.
BETTOR BIAS: How many points the public overvalues (positive numbers) or undervalues (negative numbers) a team without any justifiable reason.
POINT-SPREAD POWER: True power plus bettor bias.
To calculate the projected margin of victory for any matchup:
Take true power (home team), ADD home-field advantage and SUBTRACT true power (away team).
To calculate the projected point spread of any matchup:
Replace the true power with point-spread power, which includes bettor bias, just like the actual Vegas line does.
Here are the final 2011 Vegas college football rankings:
