I’m starting to mentally prepare for the first time Twitter melts down because a team took a meaningless safety that had spread implications. I love seeing people tweet about how they kicked their cat across the room or that “[insert coach] is the worst [insert derogatory adjective] coach of all time” or my personal favorite, “never in doubt!” I get so excited whenever I see Moose on my timeline. Don’t forget the hashtag though, #MOOSE. Moose come in all different sizes and flavors. There’s the moose that saves you, there’s the moose that rips your heart out, there’s the moose that makes you money, there’s the moose that robs you blind, and there’s plenty more moose out there doing good and bad depending on who you talk to. As I’ve started to accumulate Dr. Seuss books for my infant son, maybe I should create a Dr. Seuss book all about moose. Better idea: I’ll create the very first of its kind #MOOSE Power Ratings.

The components of the #MOOSE Power Ratings took me a little while to figure out. I decided I’d use the last 5 seasons. What makes a good moose? The first thing I could think of was 4^th quarter comebacks. It would have been pretty easy to look back and see all the great finishes such as Texas beating USC on Vince Young’s game winning drive or Florida State beating Auburn on a Jameis Winston led drive. However, those games were already decided ATS before those drives. We want ATS comebacks. I was able to produce all of the 4^th quarter comebacks and blown leads ATS since 2009. Topping the list with 24 combined comebacks and blown covers ATS are LSU and Northwestern. If you want the complete list, I posted a chart over at https://cfbmatrix.com/cfb-4th-quarter-comebacks-ats/.

What else makes a good moose? How about the same metric as above but only in the last 2 minutes of a game. These are usually the games that have the Twitter Touts up in arms because heaven forbid they’re -50 units become -52 units or whatever that Stuckey cartoon character ended down in CBB last year. Even worse is when they backdoor a win which leads to patting themselves on the back for being so sharp in picking the winning side. Shut up. But I digress. Obviously, this type of win/loss can be much more exciting/gut wrenching, depending on which side of the moose you fall on. Because of this, I weighted this category a little more heavily. Tulane has been involved in 8 of these games, but ECU has had the most blown covers in the final 2 minutes with 6. If you are an ECU fan, my condolences.

The third component is margin of cover. If you have a small margin of cover, you leave the door open for a moose to hoof into your house and stomp all over your chest. I much prefer a game/bet that is over at halftime. For moose purposes, the closer the margin of cover is to 0, the better. A clean podium sweep for the B1G with Rutgers, Michigan and Maryland having the lowest average margin. Honorable mention for highest average margin of the power 5 conferences is Stanford. Not very good for their overall rating, but fewer heart attacks are always good.

The final component I built in thanks to feedback from @DavidPurdum and @SkatingTripods is whether line movement during the week caused wins for some bettors and losses or pushes for others. I took a simple approach and only took into account open vs close and not any other movement outside of that range or in between the range. Apparently, if you bet Marshall, make sure you always get the best number, because 20% of their games in the past 5 seasons have had a meaningful impact depending on what number you ended up betting. LSU fans, you’re a close second with 18% of your lined games mattering. I show 4 teams that yielded the same result on all games whether you bet the open or close: BC, UCF, Georgia State and Tulsa.

After a little bit of weighting the components, I came up with my initial #MOOSE Power Ratings. The higher the score, the higher the likelihood of a moose. Here is my top 25:

Let’s be 100% honest. I could add 13 other metrics, but the same team is going to be on top every time. Les Miles is simply the best. He will cause you to have a heart attack by the time you’re 35. He and LSU ranked in the top 10 in the three most important of the 4 metrics. If you want to be glued to your tv for 3 hours and want an entertaining finish, odds are in your favor whether you bet on LSU or against them. I’m never betting an LSU game pre-game ever again. Les Miles, you are a thing of beauty.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be wondering who is the Wells Fargo Savings Account 0.000000005% rate of return of the #MOOSE Power Ratings. Purdue, in the most Purdue thing ever, has a negative #MOOSE rating. Negative. I didn’t even know my ratings allowed such a thing, but I’m really happy about it now that I know. So if you have things to do and really don’t want to watch a full game, Catch 5 minutes of a Purdue game and know the game is over already with their -11.6 rating.