As we look forward to this weekend’s enormous clash between Alabama and LSU, the question on the minds of many is just how healthy and effective Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa will be for the Tide offense. Obviously, Alabama’s odds of taking down the top-ranked Tigers are going to be better with a 100% Tua, so I was interested in the number of points college football fans would directly attribute to the star gunslinger.

To answer this question, I recruited a sample of 1,229 fans from around the nation to give me their predicted score to this week’s game. The rub is that I randomly assigned research participants to one of two groups:

Group 1 – was asked to assume Tua would be hurt and would not play. Group 2 – was asked to assume there would be a healthy Tua.

The difference between the two groups’ estimates of how many points Alabama will score reveals how many points college football fans attribute directly to Tua.

Now check out the results!

Tua is worth six points in the minds of fans.

Alabama’s predicted score in the scenario with a hurt Tua was 24 versus 30 in the scenario with a healthy Tua, which puts his perceived value at six points. Depending on who you are, you may be thinking that Tua is worth far more or far less than a touchdown. There really isn’t a right answer. Keep in mind that this is Tua’s value according to fan perceptions, not an on-field, performance-based metric like SP+. The amount of stock you put into fan perceptions is up to you. I have research participants give predicted scores each week as part of my nationwide MaxDiff team-ranking poll. Every now and then, they surprise me and are more accurate than Vegas, but some weeks they are flat out wrong. In short, I’m not claiming these predicted point totals will accurately reflect what we will see on Saturday. They may or may not. I do, however, think this is a reasonable estimate of Tua’s perceived value. I’ll let you decide how useful that is.

Fans are giving the Tide less of a chance than Vegas.

In both scenarios, LSU was predicted to beat the Tide, although by a smaller margin when there is a healthy Tua. By contrast, Vegas currently favors Alabama by 6.5 points at the time of writing. I’m attributing some of this to the fact that this research was fielded on Thursday of last week before Vegas released the opening lines for this game. Usually when I have fans predict scores in my weekly MaxDiff team-ranking poll, the predicted scores are very close to the Vegas spread and over/under. It would be naive to think the spreads don’t impact the predicted scores (and maybe vice versa). I strongly suspect that if I were to have fielded this poll after the point spreads were released that it would not have resulted in a predicted LSU win (at least in the healthy Tua scenario).

Fans think this will be a more defensive-oriented game than Vegas.

The predicted point totals of 55 with a hurt Tua and 61 with a healthy Tua are both less than the 65 predicted by Vegas. This suggests the participants in this research think this will be a more defensive-oriented game. Again, this perception may or may not have any basis in reality, but it is food for thought.

Shouldn’t a hurt Tua mean less points for both teams?

I thought that a hurt Tua would bring down both Alabama and LSU’s predicted score. If Tua isn’t playing, I’m going to assume that Alabama is going to run the ball more to keep Heisman front-runner Joe Burrow and the potent LSU offensive off the field as much as possible. The Tide don’t want to get into a shootout with Tua on the bench. However, a hypothetically injured Tua did not impact LSU’s predicted score AT ALL. LSU’s predicted score was 31 in both the hurt and healthy Tua scenarios. Keep in mind these aren’t the same people making predictions in both scenarios. They are extremely similar groups in terms of conference/team affiliation, level of football knowledge, age, gender, and education, but they are separate people.

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