This is all Steele's data, and he lives and breaths college football. Historically, he's been real good.
I'm doing my own thing in anticipation of the football season, i.e. playing parlays again. FYI, Steele rates the top ten teams that he feels will be the most improved teams in the country, so they "may" bear watching early on to see if a guy can capitalize on an improving team that Vegas still has under the radar. Teams like East Carolina, Marshall, UCF, FL, Auburn, Cin, So. Carolina, Colo St, and TCU.
Again, based on presumed national expectations versus him projecting they will overperform.
He expects, and not surprisingly, teams like Michigan, Washington, UCLA, Penn St, Oregon, all to be downgraded this year. (Last year he had 5 teams that he expected to improve and they all did, he also said Illinois would be down and they were).
I've been researching a developing a spreadsheet of certain team patterns over the last 2 years and I think, (at least "on paper") I've identified multiple teams that I will likely play in certain scenarios. Bearing in mind that past performance means nothing next year, but many of the teams I found are low key and have tended to beat the spread by anywhere from +11 points up to +23 points in certain environments, i.e. following a loss, road underdog, as home favorite, etc.
It may or may not pay dividends, but I intend to find out with real money, lol. Unbeknowst to me, the very best team against the spread last year was Arizona, even though they were a 10-3 team, they were outstanding in 3 separate categories...not that it means anything this year of course.
At any rate, I enjoy doing this type of exercise/research.