Pay no attention to these optimistic numbers from 247Sports unless you want to

This is a contradiction for me but sometimes I read something and my reaction is, “I wish I only had my own idiot gut to decide how I feel about this season.” There’s a lot to parse this time of year, and it’s complicated enough without bringing objective data into the dominant emotional interpretation of what is certainly bound to happen.

Recently I found the most optimistic, theoretically scientific breakdown of State’s 2017 season on 247Sports.com, which was written by Christian Corona. His game-by-game win probability projections are way more encouraging than those from either FPI or Bill Connelly.

He might be right, might be right about the whole damn thing. Those projections feel like outliers but it doesn’t make them wrong, and that is why college football is the best.

Everyone grasps that NC State has a good football team, but results confuse everything, especially past results, even though they do not bind the future. There is a hilariously wide band of potential results for the Wolfpack this fall, which is theoretically part of the fun, I am told.