About Fan Watch

College football Saturdays are a coordination problem: fifty games, four TVs' worth of kickoff windows, and somewhere in there, three outcomes that actually change your team's season. Fan Watch solves it with math and then talks to you like a friend who already did it: a tiered rooting guide, a watch plan by kickoff wave, conference races, the CFP picture, and a schedule you can make your own.

Every week we run 50,000 Monte Carlo simulations of the rest of the season: calibrated Elo win probabilities, real conference tiebreaker rules (yes, including the weird ones), conference championship games, and the 12-team CFP format, anchored to the live committee rankings. Every “root for X” is the difference between two conditional probabilities, shown only when it clears statistical noise. Fed the 2024 and 2025 seasons with results in hand, the engine re-derived all 18 conference championship matchups and all 24 playoff teams exactly: a test that the tiebreaker and selection rules are wired right, not a forecast. Every constant in the model is fitted to eleven seasons of history and validated out of sample: the full write-up, with backtests and the parts we're honest about getting wrong, is on the methodology page.

Some links to streaming services are affiliate links — if you subscribe after clicking one, Fan Watch may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Two rules keep that honest:

• The math is never for sale. Coverage numbers on the how-to-watch pages rank services by what they actually carry — services with no affiliate program (hi, YouTube TV) rank first whenever they earn it.
• Options, not tricks. Games on broadcast TV are always labeled “free over the air locally” before any paid option is offered.

Fan Watch is built by one person: Justin Kistner, a University of Oregon alum and die-hard Duck. His senior year was the Joey Harrington season: Oregon finishing #2 in 2001, Harrington a Heisman finalist with a billboard in Times Square. He was in Autzen for the USC Halloween Fright Night, the game where the two programs' fortunes flipped, and he was there for the many times Stanford ruined a perfectly good Oregon season. In the years the Ducks were in the hunt for a natty, he was the one working out what had to go their way beyond their own game: what got them in, what got them the better seed. Fan Watch is decades of that thinking, finally written down as software.

He doesn't watch alone. Over the years his wife Christine has become a Duck of her own volition, and she has a knack for calling pick sixes. Their son, despite being outfitted in Duck gear from the start of his life, currently thinks football is boring. But he has started playing football with his friends at school, so there is hope.

It's an independent, fan-built project, not affiliated with the NCAA, any conference, school, or network. Game data comes from CollegeFootballData.com.

See also: privacy policy.