We Liked Georgia by a Touchdown. Notre Dame Had Other Ideas.

Coming in, we made Georgia the better team here by about a touchdown — call it seven points. The oddsmakers barely had Georgia favored at all, more like a one-point game, essentially a coin flip. That's a wide gap. Our number said Georgia should win this comfortably, the kind of edge that turns a near-even matchup into a clear favorite. Then Notre Dame went out and won it 23-10. So much for the comfortable part.

So what did we see that the market didn't — or thought we saw? The most likely answer is schedule. We figured Georgia's body of work looked better once you account for who they'd been playing — that they'd been grinding through tougher opponents, so their results deserved more credit than the raw numbers suggested. We figured Notre Dame had been beating up on softer competition, so their results deserved a little less. In other words, we leaned hard on the idea that Georgia had simply faced a meaner slate and was better than the surface stats showed.

• We gave Georgia extra credit for a tougher schedule
• The betting market wasn't buying nearly as much of that credit
• That's where our too-high opinion of Georgia came from

But here's the honest part: we may have just had it wrong. This is one game. With a single result to go on, it's hard to say exactly where the miss came from. Maybe we overrated Georgia. Maybe we underrated Notre Dame. Maybe something we couldn't see — an injury, the weather, a bad week — tilted it. Any of those could turn a touchdown lean into a 13-point loss going the other way.

Our read isn't gospel. It can be flat wrong — which is exactly why you weigh more than one thing before you trust a number.

Bottom line: the big edge we thought Georgia had never showed up on the field, and the market read this matchup more accurately than we did. It's a clean reminder that no read is bulletproof and there's always room to sharpen. Weigh the schedule, weigh who each team actually beat, weigh the stuff that doesn't fit in a number — do that, and you get a fuller picture of how good a team really is. We'll take the loss on this one.