Arizona vs. Kansas State score prediction by expert college football model

A pair of Big 12 rivals meet up in one of college football’s two games involving ranked teams on the same field, as No. 20 Arizona travels to No. 14 Kansas State in a battle of Wildcats on Friday.

While it’s a matchup of Big 12 teams, it’s not actually a Big 12 conference game thanks to a scheduling technicality, but it’s still a good litmus test to see where these teams are in what figures to be a more competitive league championship race later on.

Arizona played close against Northern Arizona a week ago as its vaunted passing attack led by Noah Fifita and Tetairoa McMillan didn’t produce like it usually does, but it came out with the 21-10 victory.

Likewise for Kansas State, which held off an upset-minded Tulane team on the road last weekend, needing some timely defensive plays to get out of New Orleans unscathed and undefeated.

What do the experts think of the matchup? Let’s turn to the SP+ prediction model to get a preview of how Arizona and Kansas State compare in this Week 3 football game.

So far, the simulations are siding pretty definitively with the home team in this matchup.

SP+ predicts that Kansas State will defeat Arizona by a projected score of 35 to 25 and will win the game outright by an expected 9.3 points.

The model gives Kansas State a strong 72 percent chance of victory in the matchup.

SP+ is a “tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency” that attempts to predict game outcomes by measuring “the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football.”

How good is it this season? So far, the SP+ model is 47-44 against the spread with a 51.6 win percentage.

Kansas State is listed as a 7.5 point favorite against Arizona, according to the lines at FanDuel Sportsbook, which set the total at 59.5 points for the game.

FanDuel lists the moneyline odds for Kansas State at -255 and for Arizona at +205.

If you’re using this projection to bet on the game, you should take…

Other analytic tools also favor Kansas State to hold serve at home against Arizona.

That includes the College Football Power Index, a computer prediction model that uses data points from both teams to simulate games 20,000 times to pick winners.

Kansas State comes out the projected winner in 73.2 percent of the computer’s simulations, while Arizona emerged triumphant in the remaining 26.8 percent of sims.

The index favors Kansas State to be 9.5 points better than Arizona on the same field in both teams’ current composition, also enough to cover the spread.

Kansas State is projected to win 9.1 games this season and sits in second-place among Big 12 teams with a 27.6 percent chance to qualify for the College Football Playoff.

Arizona is ninth in the Big 12 with a 5 percent shot at the 12-team playoff as the computers cooled off on its expectations after last week’s game, with the Wildcats expected to win 7 games.

When: Fri., Sept. 13
Time: 7 p.m. Central
TV: Fox network

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