Methodology
How CFB Zeitgeist works.
Where the signal comes from, how we express confidence, what we don’t cover, and how we grade our own predictions.
What we track
Three things: where programs stand (competitive position, trajectory, recruiting), what their fanbases actually believe (aggregated from fan communities and prediction markets), and whether our calls were right (every projection is logged before the outcome, then graded).
Measuring fan sentiment
We aggregate signal from fan communities, prediction markets, and recruiting coverage. Not all signal is equal—sources that publish hard numbers get used differently than community discussions. When a team’s signal is too thin to support a real number, we say “Awaiting Signal” instead of fabricating one.
Making predictions honestly
Every projection we publish is logged before the outcome is known, then graded afterward. We keep a public track record so the accountability is real, not decorative.
What we don’t cover
Coordinator tracking doesn’t exist in any reliable public source, so we skip it. Some smaller programs have thin community signal. We’d rather name a gap than fill it with noise.
Sources
We pull from fan communities, prediction markets, recruiting databases, box-score providers, and team news. We don’t publish individual source weights, but the approach for combining them is consistent.
Game data, recruiting, and prediction markets update daily. Community signals and editorial cards update weekly.